Martin Chris C, Nezlek John B
Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, United States of America.
College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia, United States of America; University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Poznan, Poland.
PLoS One. 2014 Sep 30;9(9):e108732. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0108732. eCollection 2014.
The belief that ethnic majorities dominate ethnic minorities informs research on intergroup processes. This belief can lead to the social heuristic that the ethnic majority sets an upper limit that minority groups cannot surpass, but this possibility has not received much attention. In three studies of perceived income, we examined how this heuristic, which we term the White ceiling heuristic leads people to inaccurately estimate the income of a minority group that surpasses the majority. We found that Asian Americans, whose median income has surpassed White median income for nearly three decades, are still perceived as making less than Whites, with the least accurate estimations being made by people who strongly believe that Whites are privileged. In contrast, income estimates for other minorities were fairly accurate. Thus, perceptions of minorities are shaped both by stereotype content and a heuristic.
多数族裔主导少数族裔的观念影响着群体间关系的研究。这种观念可能会导致一种社会启发式思维，即多数族裔设定了少数群体无法超越的上限，但这种可能性并未受到太多关注。在三项关于感知收入的研究中，我们考察了这种我们称之为“白人上限启发式”的思维方式是如何导致人们不准确地估计超过多数族裔的少数群体的收入的。我们发现，近三十年来亚裔美国人的收入中位数已经超过了白人的收入中位数，但他们仍被认为收入低于白人，而那些坚信白人享有特权的人做出的估计最不准确。相比之下，对其他少数族裔的收入估计则较为准确。因此，对少数族裔的认知既受刻板印象内容的影响，也受启发式思维的影响。
