People treat group members as interchangeable to reduce cognitive effort.
Evidence
A central idea regarding the internal characteristics of categories is that people sometimes hold “monopolistic” categories in which all category members are thought to be interchangeable. It is in this sense that people’s reliance on categories is supposedly based on the “principle of least effort”: in order to reduce at low cost the uncertainty of their social environment, perceivers treat all members of a social group as being alike. — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 1147
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- DEFINE: Explains Allport’s monopolistic categories and the principle of least effort.
- XREF: Connects to stereotype-as-economizing-device discussions common in social cognition work like Fiske’s.
Related
- Monopolistic categories make all group members interchangeable under least-effort thinking (similarity 0.93)
- Cognitive laziness in categorization generates belief in group essences (similarity 0.81)
- Knowing a group well reduces reliance on rigid categorical thinking (similarity 0.80)
- Multiple in-group categories can be cognitively represented in simplified or complex ways (similarity 0.79)
- Once categorized, group members are assumed similar within and different across categories (similarity 0.79)
- Categorization reduces uncertainty at a predictable cost to accuracy (similarity 0.79)
- Recategorizing at broader levels can reduce intergroup prejudice. (similarity 0.79)
- Categories are mentally represented by idealized prototypical members (similarity 0.78)
- Beliefs that groups have essences arise from categorizing lazily (similarity 0.78)