In the long nineteenth century, dominant stereotypes presented people of the Mediterranean South as particularly passionate and unruly, therefore incapable of adapting to the moral and political ...duties imposed by European civilization and modernity. This book studies, for the first time in comparative perspective, the gender dimension of a process that legitimised internal hierarchies between North and South in the continent. It also analyses how this phenomenon was responded to from Spain and Italy, pointing to the similarities and differences between both countries. Drawing on travel narratives, satires, philosophical works, novels, plays, operas, and paintings, it shows how this transnational process affected, in changing historical contexts, the ways in which nation, gender, and modernity were imagined and mutually articulated.
Word embeddings are a powerful machine-learning framework that represents each English word by a vector. The geometric relationship between these vectors captures meaningful semantic relationships ...between the corresponding words. In this paper, we develop a framework to demonstrate how the temporal dynamics of the embedding helps to quantify changes in stereotypes and attitudes toward women and ethnic minorities in the 20th and 21st centuries in the United States. We integrate word embeddings trained on 100 y of text data with the US Census to show that changes in the embedding track closely with demographic and occupation shifts over time. The embedding captures societal shifts—e.g., the women’s movement in the 1960s and Asian immigration into the United States—and also illuminates how specific adjectives and occupations became more closely associated with certain populations over time. Our framework for temporal analysis of word embedding opens up a fruitful intersection between machine learning and quantitative social science.
Abstract
Background and Objectives
Stereotypes are beliefs about a particular group often adopted to bypass complex information processing. Like racism and other forms of discrimination, ageism ...affects individuals and society as a whole. The purpose of the study was to analyze the Stereotype Content and Strength Survey (SCSS) designed to update assessment tools commonly used to measure stereotypes of older adults.
Research Design and Methods
An updated survey was developed including aging-related descriptive items from previously published studies. Students enrolled at two Midwestern universities (n = 491) were directed to think about their perceptions of “older adults” and select the proportion they believed could be described by the items used in the tool. Response categories for each descriptive item were dichotomized and operationalized to be a strong stereotype if the collapsed response percentage was significantly ≥80%.
Results
A Principal Axis Factor analysis and Direct Oblim rotation was computed on 117 descriptive items representing positive, negative, and physical characteristics, resulting in a 3-factor model with acceptable psychometric properties. Cronbach alpha analyses revealed reliable scales for negative (α = .92), positive (α = .88), and physical (α = .81) stereotypes. Of 117 descriptive items, 33 emerged as strong stereotypes including 30 positive, 2 physical, and 1 negative item.
Discussion and Implications
This updated assessment has the potential to contribute to an understanding of the existence of age-related stereotypes as well as the strength, or the proportion of older adults who could be described by each of the items used in the SCSS.
In the United States, there is a common stereotype associating brilliance with men. This gender brilliance stereotype emerges early and may undermine women's engagement in many prestigious careers. ...However, past research on its acquisition has focused almost exclusively on American children's beliefs of White people's intellectual talents. Therefore, less is known about how this stereotype develops in non-Western cultures and whether children consider other social identities such as race in forming this stereotype. To address these issues, the present research (a) provided the first cross-cultural test examining its development in 5- to 7-year-old Chinese and American children and (b) compared children's gender brilliance stereotype of White people with that of Asian people. Studies 1 (N = 96; Chinese children) and 2 (N = 96; Chinese children) revealed that, similar to American children, Chinese children associated brilliance with White men (vs. White women) around the age of 6. In contrast, Studies 3 (N = 96; Chinese children) and 4 (N = 96; American children; 76.9% White) showed that 5- to 7-year-old children from both cultures associated brilliance with Asian women (vs. Asian men). The results suggest that the gender stereotype about brilliance has a racial component and may be culturally consistent. Overall, these findings add to our knowledge of children's acquisition of the gender stereotype about brilliance in non-Western cultural contexts and highlight the importance of considering multiple social identities to understand the acquisition of stereotypes.
Women and men play video games in approximately equal numbers. Despite this similarity, video gaming is still strongly associated with men. A common justification for this stereotype is that, ...although women might play games, they should not be considered “true” or “hard-core” gamers because they play more casually and less skillfully compared to their male counterparts. In this contribution, we review the existing literature on gender and gaming to investigate the male gamer stereotype in terms of its accuracy, persistence, effects, and future perspective. We conclude that the stereotype varies in accuracy depending on the definition of “gamer.” We further argue that the persistence of this stereotype can be explained by the fact that almost all professional and highly visible figures in gaming culture are male. On the other hand, female players who achieve a moderate level of competence are rendered invisible or are actively marginalized. We argue that the effects of the male gamer stereotype can be harmful to women, precluding them from the positive outcomes of video game play such as enhanced access to fields of science, technology, and engineering.
Cultural stereotypes that link Black race to crime in the United States originated with and are perpetuated by policies that result in the disproportionate criminalization and punishment of Black ...people. The scientific record is replete with evidence that these stereotypes impact perceivers' perceptions, information processing, and decision-making in ways that produce more negative criminal legal outcomes for Black people than White people. However, relatively scant attention has been paid to understanding how situations that present a risk of being evaluated through the lens of crime-related stereotypes also directly affect Black people. In this article, I consider one situation in particular: encounters with police. I draw on social psychological research on stereotype threat generally as well as the few existing studies of crime-related stereotype threat specifically to illuminate how the cultural context creates psychologically distinct experiences of police encounters for Black people as compared to White people. I further consider the potential ramifications of stereotype threat effects on police officers' judgments and treatment of Black people as well as for Black people's safety and well-being in other criminal legal contexts and throughout their lives. Finally, I conclude with a call for increased scholarly attention to crime-related stereotype threat and the role it plays in contributing to racial disparities in policing outcomes, particularly with regard to diverse racial, ethnic, and intersectional identities and personal vulnerability factors, and the systemic changes that might mitigate its deleterious effects.
Public Significance Statement
Cultural stereotypes that portray Black people as criminal cause Black people to expect unfair judgment and treatment when they encounter police officers. This culturally-, contextually-, stereotype-driven psychological experience is stressful and burdensome. It also may increase Black people's vulnerability to disproportionately negative policing and criminal legal outcomes compared to White people, and otherwise compromise their safety and well-being. Psychologists have an important role to play in illuminating the unacceptable costs imposed by this continuing legacy of slavery and developing interventions to change the contexts that generate them.
El objetivo de esta investigación es conocer la opinión del alumnado sobre la Expresión Corporal y la percepción que tiene el profesorado de este contenido, así como analizar si existen ...estereotipos sobre este contenido por parte de los participantes. Un total de 66 alumnos y su profesora han participado en este estudio. Para cumplir con los objetivos del trabajo, se suministró a los participantes el cuestionario de actitudes hacia la expresión corporal antes y después de la realización de una Unidad Didáctica. Los resultados mostraron que diferencias significativas en la valoración, agrado y consideración del profesorado tras la realización de la Unidad Didáctica. Se concluye que la opinión del alumnado tras esta experiencia concreta ha mejorado puesto que en un primer momento gran parte del alumnado no practicó Expresión Corporal, asimismo se destaca que la opinión entre alumnado y profesorado es similar y que prácticamente no existen estereotipos alrededor de la Expresión Corporal.
Abstract. The aim of this study was to analyse students’ opinions about body expression and their teacher’s perception of the contents of a corresponding unit of work, as well as to investigate the existence of stereotypes about body expression. In total, 66 students and their teacher participated in this study. Participants completed the questionnaire on attitudes towards body expression before and after studying the teaching unit. The results showed significant differences in the degree of satisfaction, enjoyment, and teachers’ consideration expressed by the students after completing the unit of work. It was concluded that the students’ opinions improved after studying the unit focused on body expression, especially since a large proportion of the students had not studied a unit of this nature before. Our results also highlighted the similarity between the opinions expressed by students and their teacher, and at the end of the unit, almost no indications of stereotypical beliefs associated with notions of body expression were evident among the participants.
One explanation for the dearth of women in elected office is that voters stereotype candidates based on their gender. Research in this vein often assumes that female candidates will be stereotyped ...similarly to women (e.g., as compassionate) and measures stereotypes as such. We question this assumption, proposing instead that female politicians constitute a subtype—a new stereotypical category with its own qualities—of the broader group of women. We compare the content of female politician stereotypes to other relevant comparison groups including politicians, male politicians, and female professionals. Using a classic methodology to determine stereotype content (Katz & Braly, 1933), we find that female politicians do not share the qualities that are ascribed to women (e.g., warm, empathetic). Our results show that female politicians seem to be "losing" on male stereotypical qualities while also not having any advantage on qualities typical of women. The content of female politician stereotypes is nebulous and lacks clarity in comparison to all other groups examined. We discuss implications for the future measurement of politician stereotypes.
This meta-analysis, spanning 5 decades of Draw-A-Scientist studies, examined U.S. children's gender-science stereotypes linking science with men. These stereotypes should have weakened over time ...because women's representation in science has risen substantially in the United States, and mass media increasingly depict female scientists. Based on 78 studies (N = 20,860; grades K-12), children's drawings of scientists depicted female scientists more often in later decades, but less often among older children. Children's depictions of scientists therefore have become more gender diverse over time, but children still associate science with men as they grow older. These results may reflect that children observe more male than female scientists in their environments, even though women's representation in science has increased over time.
Stereotype threat theory suggests that negative stereotypes and devaluing content in the media impair the cognitive and educational achievement of members of the negatively portrayed groups (e.g., ...Latino Americans, women), whereas nonstereotyped recipients are not affected or even show reversed effects (stereotype lift). A meta-analysis of 33 experiments (n = 1,831) yielded an overall mean effect size of d = −0.38 (random effects model) in support of the stereotype threat assumption. The results further involve a check on publication bias and moderator analyses with respect to the portrayed group, the dependent variable (academic identification vs. performance), the media format (ads vs. news vs. entertainment), and the world region in which the study was conducted. A second meta-analysis on the stereotype lift hypothesis yielded an overall mean effect size of d = 0.17 (k = 12, n = 589, nonsignificant, random effects model). Our meta-analytical findings are in support of stereotype threat theory, indicating that negative stereotypes and devaluing content in the media impair members of negatively stereotyped groups, whereas nonmembers are not affected. Implications and open research questions are outlined.
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