Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2022, Vol. 45 ›› Issue (2): 506-511.

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Primary Social Category and Secondary Social Category: the Interaction Among Multiple Social Categories

  

  • Received:2019-12-09 Revised:2020-06-20 Online:2022-03-20 Published:2022-12-11
  • Contact: Wang Pei

多重社会范畴间的相互作用

王沛1,陈凡迪2   

  1. 1. 华东师范大学
    2. 上海师范大学心理学系
  • 通讯作者: 王沛

Abstract: Primary categories are human’s inherent, nature endowed and specific categories, such as sex, age, race and emotion. Secondary categories are individual acquired, environmental impacting and abstract categories, like occupation, religion and stratum. Past research has found that the influence between primary social categories is mutual. And there are two forms of interaction between primary social categories which are symmetry and asymmetry. Specifically, symmetry interaction means that category X affects the processing of category Y, and category Y also affects the processing of category X. For example, Carpinella, Chen, Hamilton and Johnson (2015) found that as faces become more feminine, people are more likely to classify faces as white and less likely to classify as black. When category X affects the processing of category Y, and category Y does not affect the processing of category X. This situation is called "asymmetric interaction". Using the Garner paradigm, Karnadewi and Lipps(2011) found that gender affects face’s emotional classification, that is, when the sex and emotion of target face change simultaneously, the reaction time of individual emotional classification is slower than that of emotional change but gender invariant. But emotion does not affect the classification of gender faces. It is worth noting that when three or more categories interact, there is only symmetric interaction between the categories. Martin and his colleagues(2015) found that any two unnoticed changes in social categories increase the individual's response to the third social category.The influence between primary social category and secondary social category is also mutual, but up to now, there is no study to show whether the interaction is symmetric or asymmetric. On the other hand, The interaction between primary social categories is caused by top-down social concepts such as stereotype overlapping and bottom-up category cues. Bottom-up phenotypic cues lead to interaction between categories. For example, Klothia Dammn Schweinberger and Wiese(2015) found that skin texture plays an important role in the interaction between facial age and facial sex. Gender cues for faces vary according to ethnic categories (e.g. eye size, nose size, Craigg, Koch, & Lipp, 2016). In addition, Freeman et al. (2011) found that occupational phenotypic cues affect ethnic categorization. Therefore, the interaction between primary social categories and primary and secondary social categories may be affected by bottom-up cues. Furthermore, a great deal of research has found that top-down stereotype overlapping lead to interaction between primary social categories. For example, Stolier and Freeman(2016, 2017), using the mouse tracking paradigm , found that the individual's own unique stereotype association influence can predict their category processing , and the similarity between the categories of overlapping stereotype is reflected as the similarity between the right fusiform gyrus (RFG) and the orbital frontal cortex (OFC) activation pattern. More importantly, the interaction of these social categories cannot be explained by only the similarity of bottom-up visual cues. In contrast, the top-down stereotypes overlap link seemingly unrelated categories together. Although a small number of studies have shown that the interaction between primary social category and secondary social category is caused by bottom-up category cues and there is an overlap of stereotypes between the two categories, there is still no research to prove the role of stereotype overlap in this interaction.

Key words: Social Category, Secondary Social Category, Primary Social Category, Stereotype Overlapping

摘要: 社会范畴加工中原发性社会范畴间存在相互作用。这种相互作用是自上而下的刻板印象重叠和自下而上的范畴线索共同造成的,并且存在对称和非对称两种表现形式。原发性和继发性社会范畴间的影响也是相互的,但是其具体表现形式暨是对称的还是非对称的尚有待进一步探索。尽管已有少量研究证明原发性和继发性社会范畴间的相互作用存在自下而上的范畴线索的作用,但仍需进一步探明刻板印象重叠在两类社会范畴的相互作用中发挥怎样的作用。

关键词: 社会范畴 原发性社会范畴 继发性社会范畴 刻板印象重叠效应