Social attribution, correspondence bias, and the emergence of stereotypes

Yzerbyt, Rogier and Fiske (1998) argued that perceivers confronted with a group high in entitativity (i.e., a group perceived as an entity, a tight-knit group) more readily call upon an underlying essence to explain people's behavior than perceivers confronted with an aggregate. Their study showed that group entitativity promoted dispositional attributions for the behavior of group members. Moreover, stereotypes emerged when people faced entitative groups, In this study, we replicate and extend these results by providing further evidence that the process of social attribution is responsible for the emergence of stereotypes, We use the attitude attribution paradigm (Sones & Harris, 1967) and show that the correspondence bias is stronger for an entitative group target than for an aggregate. Besides, several dependent measures indicate that the target's group membership stands as a plausible causal factor to account for members' behavior, a process we call Social Attribution. Implications for current theories of stereotyping are discussed.