Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1996, Vol. 71, No. 5, 888-898 Copyright 1996 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0O22-3514/96/S3.OO Accessible Attitudes Influence Categorization of Multiply Categorizable Objects Eliot R. Smith Purdue University Russell H. Fazio Indiana University Bloomington Mary Ann Cejka Purdue University Every person or object can be categorized in multiple ways. For example, a person can be categorized (and hence stereotyped) by gender, age, race, or occupation. Earlier research demonstrated that objects toward which people have highly accessible attitudes attract attention when they are present in the visualfield.On the basis of that work, the authors hypothesized that categories toward which people have highly accessible attitudes are preferentially applied to multiply categorizable objects. Three experiments, with cued recall and categorization response time as dependent variables, sup- port the hypothesis. Categories toward which people's attitudes had been rendered accessible by an earlier task were more readily produced in response to multiply categorizable objects serving as a cue, or could more quickly be verified asfittingthe object. These results demonstrate the power and functional value of accessible attitudes in shaping basic categorization and judgmental processes. Suppose an individual encounters a woman and uses stereo- types to make inferences about her. What traits or other charac- teristics will be inferred? Now suppose that the target person is not only a woman but is a White woman, noticeably short of stature, who speaks with a strong Southern accent, is 72 years of age, and is expensively but conservatively dressed. Any of these observable characteristics—not only gender—may be associated with stereotypes and therefore may affect the per- ceiver's reactions to the target. Which stereotype will the per- ceiver use? Questions like this must arise whenever a perceiver encoun- ters any real person—for a real person is never a member ofjust one group but always belongs to multiple cross-cutting social groups (based on gender, ethnicity, age, occupation, and so on). Yet the social psychology research literature on stereotyping has almost entirely ignored these questions and has assumed that a target belongs to one and only one group. For example, rather than real people, researchers have used verbal person descrip- tions such as a woman (vs. a man) or Joan (vs. John) as stimuli in studies of stereotyping, forcing participants to respond to the target's gender alone. Methodologically simplifying the issues in this way made good sense in the initial stages of research on Eliot R. Smith and Mary Ann Cejka, Department of Psychological Sciences, Purdue University; Russell H. Fazio, Department of Psychol- ogy, Indiana University Bloomington. This research was supported by National Institute of Mental Health Grants R01 MH46840, K02 MH01178, R01 MH38832, and K02 MH00452. We are grateful to Teresa Robeson for her capable service as the experimenter in Experiments 1 and 2. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Eliot R. Smith, Department of Psychological Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana 47907-1364, or to Russell H. Fazio, Depart- ment of Psychology, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana 47405. stereotyping processes, but having made much theoretical and empirical progress, perhaps it is now time to address the issues raised by multiple categorization. This article begins explora- tion of the factors that influence a perceiver's use of one cate- gory rather than another, reporting three studies showing that the accessibility of the perceiver's attitude toward the category is one such factor. Social Categorization: Assessment and Determinants Initial work on multiple categorization depended on the de- velopment of methods for assessing category use. Zarate and Smith (1990) devised the Social Category Verification Task, a method that assesses the time it takes people to categorize a target person in different ways. In Zarate and Smith's study, par- ticipants read a category label (either black, white, man, or woman) and then saw a head-and-shoulders photo of a person on a screen. They were instructed to push a yes or no key as rapidly and accurately as possible to indicate whether or not the person was a member of the given category, and the response time (RT) was recorded. Zarate and Smith's results supported the validity of this method: Categorization RT measures were related to the attribution of stereotypic traits to a target person. Specifically, participants who categorized photos by race more quickly, as well as (independently) those who categorized by gender more slowly, were more likely to ascribe racially stereo- typic traits to the pictured individuals. In 1992, Smith and Zarate outlined a general theory of ex- emplar-based social judgment and inference, which makes ex- plicit predictions about what category will be used when many are available. Drawing on Medin and Schaffer's (1978) context model of categorization and its extension by Nosofsky (1986), Smith and Zarate argued that the perceiver's relative attention to different stimulus attributes influences perceived similarity 888 This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.