The Hidden Architecture of Stereotype

Social stereotypes are traditionally understood as direct associations between groups and traits. Here, we show people also systematically link social groups to concepts across nonsocial domains, such as women to wine and harps, men to beer and drums. These seemingly nonsocial objects form a hidden architecture of stereotypes, which we bring into view. By asking participants, ``If X were a Y, what Y would it be?", we mapped 100 social groups across eight semantic domains such as beverages, musical instruments, and color, and found that these cross-domain mappings closely mirrored the perceived warmth and competence of social groups. By further randomly assigning participants to reason through counter-stereotypical cross-domain mappings using the prompt “If X were a Y, it would be y,” we shifted their subsequent justifications toward portraying the target groups as more competent and warmer than they otherwise would have. Analogical reasoning that emphasizes structural similarity was more effective at changing evaluations than associative reasoning based on contextual or surface-level similarity. Our findings suggest that stereotypical traits can be emergent properties of rich associative networks, and that manipulating which everyday objects people link to social groups-even seemingly irrelevant ones-can change how people make sense of social groups.