Gelpí Rebekah A, Tang Yikai, Jackson Ethan C, Cunningham William A
Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, 100 St. George Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 3G3.
Vector Institute, 101 College Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5G 1L7.
PNAS Nexus. 2025 Mar 4;4(3):pgaf076. doi: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgaf076. eCollection 2025 Mar.
Despite often being perceived as morally objectionable, stereotypes are a common feature of social groups, a phenomenon that has often been attributed to biased motivations or limits on the ability to process information. We argue that one reason for this continued prevalence is that preexisting expectations about how others will behave, in the context of social coordination, can change the behaviors of one's social partners, creating the very stereotype one expected to see, even in the absence of other potential sources of stereotyping. We use a computational model of dynamic social coordination to illustrate how this "feedback loop" can emerge, engendering and entrenching role-consistent stereotypic behavior and then show that human behavior on the task generates a comparable feedback loop. Notably, people's choices on the task are not related to social dominance or system justification, suggesting biased motivations are not necessary to maintain these stereotypes.
尽管刻板印象常常被视为在道德上令人反感，但它却是社会群体的一个常见特征，这一现象常常被归因于有偏见的动机或信息处理能力的局限。我们认为这种现象持续存在的一个原因是，在社会协调的背景下，对他人行为方式的先有预期会改变自己社会伙伴的行为，从而产生自己原本预期会看到的刻板印象，即使在没有其他潜在刻板印象来源的情况下也是如此。我们使用一个动态社会协调的计算模型来说明这种“反馈回路”是如何出现的，它如何产生并巩固与角色一致的刻板行为，然后表明人们在这项任务中的行为会产生类似的反馈回路。值得注意的是，人们在任务中的选择与社会主导地位或系统正当性无关，这表明维持这些刻板印象并不一定需要有偏见的动机。
