Two studies examined the organization and processing of consensually defined ethnic/national stereotypes as a function of group membership. A first study examined the responses and reaction times of 91 subjects to attributes associated with an in‐group label (English Canadian) and two out‐group labels (French Canadian and American). A second study examined the responses of 40 Canadian and 40 Chinese subjects to five group labels: Canadian, Chinese, American, Filipino and Mexican. In terms of stereotype organization it was found that stereotyping was evidenced only for groups that are meaningful in the social milieu. Furthermore, in‐group stereotyping was found to be more evaluative in nature than out‐group stereotyping, and in‐group stereotyping was associated with a more favourable in‐group attitude. These findings indicate that in‐group stereotyping represents a mechanism for asserting positive in‐group distinctiveness. In terms of processing ethnic labels, it was found that stereotypes serve a categorization function in that stereotypic attributes were processed more rapidly than non‐stereotypic attributes. In addition, it was found that processing attributes associated with in‐group labels generally took longer than processing attributes associated with out‐group labels. This latter effect was moderated in certain cases by the stereotypicality of the attributes but not by their evaluativeness.