Abstract
This research aims to investigate the contents and characteristics of stereotypes about the rich and the poor groups of the public. One hundred and fifty two participants freely report 2813 words of stereotypes about the rich and the poor. Results show that, the contents of stereotypes about the rich and the poor consist of three dimensions which are competence, sociability and morality. Generally, the rich has been seen as high competence, low sociability and bad morality, while the poor has been seen as low competence, mid sociability and good morality. The valences between competence and morality are negatively correlated, which means the stereotypes of competence and morality are complementary. The utilitarianism and pragmatism explanations and the system justification theory are discussed.
Highlights
Stereotype is a cognitive structure consisting of the perceiver’s knowledge, beliefs and expectation about a social group
The rich has been seen as high competence, low sociability and bad morality, while the poor has been seen as low competence, mid sociability and good morality
The valences between competence and morality are negatively correlated, which means the stereotypes of competence and morality are complementary
Summary
Stereotype is a cognitive structure consisting of the perceiver’s knowledge, beliefs and expectation about a social group. It’s a relatively fixed concept or view of the characteristics and causes of a group member [1]. It plays an important role in people’s social cognition and behavior. For the purpose of saving cognitive resources and promoting cognitive processing, people will tend to adopt cognitive shortcuts to directly determine their coping styles according to the social category to which the target belong. Since the cognitive processing mechanism of stereotypes needs to be verified in different cases, many researchers began to simplify the description of stereotypes and try to distinguish social groups by only a few dimensions.
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