Self-Stereotyping

Self-stereotyping occurs when individuals' perceptions of their own characteristics correspond to the characteristics attributed to a social group to which they belong (i.e., stereotypes of their group). Researchers commonly measure self-stereotyping in one of two ways. The first way involves measuring the extent to which individuals attribute to themselves those characteristics commonly thought to describe their group. For example, it is a common belief that women in general are poor at math. Assessing whether individual women feel as if they are poor at math would be consistent with this way of measuring self-stereotyping. The second way researchers assess self-stereotyping is by measuring how similar individual group members think they are to their group or to a typical group member. For example, a researcher may ask ...