in some circumstances we make categorical judgments of people. However, in other circumstances we make more individuating judgments based on the information we have about them.
We make an initial categorization of a person on the basis of the initial information we learn about them. This might well be on an obvious characteristic such as their age, gender or ethnicity. If a person does not interest we will not bother to analyze them further. However, if we are motived to consider the person further, we will then attend to the information about the person.
Our impressions lie on a continuum from automatic initial categorizations to thoughtful piecemeal integration, depending on how much time and attention we allocate to the information and the ease of fitting the person to a particular category.
Often it is only when we meet a person from a different culture that we suddenly become aware that the social conventions of our culture are not universal. We can consider stereotypes as being like social conventions. Stereotypes provide us with ready explanations. When using a stereotype we are making an attribution: we attribute the assumed group characteristics to the person being stereotyped. Stereotypes are essentially internal attributions.
149-164In the formation of social representation two processes are important in order to make the unfamiliar: anchoring and objectification. Anchoring is the process of naming and classifying the unfamiliar in terms of what is known.
Social representations are not explanations at the level of the individual but are essentially social, as they are collectively held by the group, and the social process of social interaction and communication is crucial to their construction.
D’Anderade defines a cultural model as ‘a cognitive schema that is intersubjectively shared by a social group’
Cultural models, whilst being able to account for everyday knowledge within a culture, do not fully deal with the dynamic construction of social knowledge through interaction and communication. Social representations, which explain how everyday knowledge is formed and developed, might be viewed as a way of extending and developing this approach.
Stereotypes are more than just cognitive schemas. Stereotypes are social representations: they are objectified cognitive and affective structures about social groups within society which are extensively shared and which emerge and proliferate within the particular social and political milieu of a given historical moment. Stereotypes do not simply exist in individuals’ heads. They are socially and discursively constructed in the course of everybody’s communication, and, once objectified, assume an independent and sometimes prescriptive reality. It is native to argue that stereotypes are simply a byproduct of the cognitive need to simplify reality. With stereotypes defined as social representations certain order properties emerge. Social representations have a certain rationality. They are not a product of a failure to think ‘properly’ or a distortion. Rather they evolve out of the communication within a social group that objectifies and legitimizes the social knowledge of the group.
The involvement of the mass media in the development and maintenance of social representations. The development of radio, film, television, and the internet has provided new media for communication, both widening the range of sources as well as speeding up the communication process.