The Formation of Generalized versus Context-Specific Beliefs About Social Groups: A Contingency-Learning Perspective

In a highly powered ( n = 143) preregistered study, we investigated how individuals form generalized and contextualized beliefs about social groups. We adopted an impression formation paradigm in which participants were shown members of two groups exhibiting different behaviors within the same context (group as predictive cue) or only one group exhibiting different behaviors in two contexts (context as predictive cue). In the respective learning contexts, participants linked the presented groups with the characteristics underlying the behavior of their members. Differently, in the “group as predictive cue” condition, group characteristics were as strong in a novel context as in the learned contexts, indicating generalized stereotype formation, whereas in the “context as predictive cue” condition, they did not appear, indicating context-specific stereotype formation. These results suggest that whether beliefs about groups are learned in a generalized or in a context-specific way depends on the predictive value of the context information.