Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1978, Vol. 36, No. 7, 778-793 Categorical and Contextual Bases of Person Memory and Stereotyping Shelley E. Taylor, Susan T. Fiske, Nancy L. Etcoff, and Audrey J. Ruderman Harvard University In three studies, subjects observed slide and tape portrayals of interacting small groups that were of mixed sex or mixed race. Hypotheses tested were (a) that social perceivers encode person information by race and sex; (b) that this fact leads to minimizing within-group differences and exaggerating between-group differences; (c) that perceivers stereotype accordingly; (d) that within-group attributes, both stereotyped and nonstereotyped, are exaggerated in inverse pro- portion to the size of the minority subgroup; (e) that better discriminations are made within smaller subgroups; (f) that imputations of attributes to groups as a whole are also sensitive to the makeup of the group; and (g) that all these behaviors are attenuated when the perceiver is a member of the subgroup evaluated. All but the last hypothesis received at least partial support. Results are discussed in terms of categorization processes and suggest that normal cognitive processes explain the process of stereotyping quite well. Stereotyping has been one of the most pro- vocative and explored phenomena in social psychology. It is usually denned as the product of a faulty reasoning process that is rigidly unresponsive to feedback (see, for example, Lippmann, 1922). Generally, the study of stereotyping has focused on impressions of racial and ethnic groups, and virtually every prominent theory in psychology has tackled this issue at one time or another. In 1954, Gordon Allport proposed that the stereotyping of racial and ethnic groups may be intrinsic to the cognitive system. That is, people oversimplify their experience by selec- tively attending to certain features of the in- formation within the environment and by forming categories, concepts, and generaliza- This research was supported by National Institute of Mental Health Grant MH-26460 to the first author. The authors are grateful to David Hamilton, Reid Hastie, David Kenny, John McConahay, and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments and suggestions and to Joachim Winkler and Mary Close for running subjects. Requests for reprints should be sent to Shelley E. Taylor, Department of Psychology and Social Rela- tions, 1340 William James Hall, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138. tions to deal with vast quantities of available data. Allport proposed that these processes apply to the perception and categorization of people as well as objects and that by evolving socially meaningful categories in which to place people, the social perceiver deals with an overload of information about people in the same oversimplified fashion as is used to deal with objects. Despite this early injunction to study the cognitive aspects of stereotyping, most re- searchers have not followed this course. Most social psychological approaches to stereotyp- ing have assumed that something about the material involved in stereotyping (i.e., ethnic and racial groups) short-circuits the normal reasoning process. Indeed, this belief has forced a split between work in cognitive psychology and the stereotyping literature, suggesting a dichotomy that may not be warranted. That is, there is no theoretical or empirical reason to assume that forming generalizations about ethnic groups is radically different from forming generalizations about other categories of objects. Yet comparisons between the two literatures have been virtually absent until relatively recently (see Hamilton, 1976). Copyright 1978 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0022-3514/78/3607-0778$00.75 778