Daniel Sude, Ph.D.

What variables are relevant to my postulated practical question of how to change people’s use of stereotyping, with regard to racial attitudes?

Well, first I brainstorm a set of variables.

Let’s look at an output from that process:

What are the different characteristics of stereotyping that I see around me?:

1. Thinking of individuals as belonging to the same “group” or being from the same category of people.
2. Attributing traits to either a) all members of that group or b) most members of that group.
3. Attributing traits based on a) observation of a single member of the group, b) observations from an initial encounter with multiple members of the group, c) observations based on the totality of encounters with group members, d) observation of representations of the group in the media, e) popular ways of talking about the group, f) traits attributed to the group that help justify group-based inequalities, g) traits that group members have by definition – believing in Jesus and being a practicing evangelical Christian, for example, h) observations based on a statistical average, i) observations based on a statistical average, taking into account the variability around that average.

With two ways of looking at 2 and nine ways of looking at 3, we already have 18 possible definitions of stereotyping, just from one brainstorming session by one person. In choosing to change the way people stereotype, we have to target a particular type of stereotyping and either eliminate it or change it into a different type of stereotyping.

For example, I might want to take someone who takes 3-d (observations of a group in the media) and infers 2-a (that all members of a group has that trait), and shift them to 3-i (data driven observations about the mean and standard deviation for that group) and 2-b (applied to the way they think about most people in that group).

Ok – we have a goal – now what are different ways of measuring these variables before we design our intervention?