Exemplar and Prototype Use in Social Categorization

Categorizing people into social groups mediates many processes of interest to social psychology, including stereotyping as well as perceivers' affective and behavioral reactions to the categorized target persons. Though researchers have often assumed that categorization depends on the similarity of the target to an abstracted category prototype, exemplar-based categorization may also be important under some circumstances. We demonstrate that prototype- and exemplar-based social categorization can be empirically distinguished and that socially realistic manipulations can lead perceivers to weight one or the other process more heavily. Perceivers who learn about group prototypes before encountering individual group members (as might occur through social learning of a stereotype) engage in more prototype-based processing, relative to perceivers who encounter group members at the outset. Implications for person memory and social categorization processes, as well as for intergroup relations, are discussed.