Abstract
As the psychological representation of social groups, previous studies on stereotypes mainly divided social groups from race, gender and age. With the rapid development of economy, the gap between the rich and the poor is particularly prominent. Social hierarchy has become an important clue of group classification, and its implicit stereotype has a significant impact on interpersonal communication. Social hierarchy has two dimensions of power and status. However, most previous studies have unilaterally investigated the stereotype of social hierarchy from the perspective of power or status, and their conclusions are still not consistent, which may ignore the different roles of power and status in stereotypes. Therefore, this study aims to comprehensively investigate the content of implicit stereotypes of social hierarchy.
This experiment adopted probe recognition paradigm. In this experiment, behavioral sentences that implied a trait were presented first, followed by trait words and participants were asked to judge whether trait words had ever appeared in behavioral sentences. It was easy for the subjects to deduce the corresponding trait spontaneously when they see the behavior sentences. When the detection words are consistent with the trait of the subjects' inferring, the concept of spontaneous activation of the trait interfered with the recognition. Therefore, when the subjects needed a longer reaction, they can judge that the detection words have not appeared. In addition, since stereotypes promote spontaneous trait inference, and vice versa, this study compared the response time differences between value under the same actor condition. The longer the response time, the more likely the trait is to be consistent with the actor's stereotype. Experiment 1 manipulated targets in occupations that differ in power and status, which was designed a 2(power: high, low) × 2(status: high, low) ×2(value: positive, negative) within?subject study. Experiment 2 manipulated the power and status of fictional characters and conducted a mixed design study at the same time. The dependent variable was the response time of the trait words of warmth and competence respectively.
For the repeated measure ANOVA of the response time for the traits of competence or warmth, the results of experiments 1 and 2 showed as follows. On the stereotype of competence, regardless of status, individuals' positive responses to high?power group inference were significantly longer than negative responses to low?power group inference. And for the trait inference of warmth, regardless of power, individuals were significantly longer when they had a positive response to high?status groups than when they had a negative response to low?status groups.
In summary, the present study demonstrated that, power and status played different roles in the stereotypes of warmth and competence dimensions, in which power positively predicted competence and status positively predicted warmth. This study proposed a social hierarchy implicit stereotype content model, highlighting the separation of power and status at the implicit level in the stereotype of competence and warmth. Understanding implicit stereotypes would help an actor to establish or change others' impression on him, namely, impression management, which was also an effective strategy to obtain social recognition or maintain social identity.
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Implicit Stereotype of Social Hierarchy: The Role of Power and Status[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2021, 44(1): 118-125
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