Stereotypes serve as cognitive shortcuts that sustain us-versus-them attribution patterns

Evidence

As with shared grievances, a bidirectional causal relationship can be assumed between collective identity and adversarial attributions because they tend to reinforce each other. Collective identity fosters (self-)stereotyping processes, and stereotypes provide easy and simple explanations for complex social events (e.g., “Jews are greedy and responsible for our nation’s economic problems”; Tajfel, 1981). Thus, stereotypes lend themselves to group-based attributions in general and to in-group-serving attributions in particular, resulting in adversarial attributions from which “we” emerge as the innocent victims or good guys and “they” as the perpetrators or bad guys (Hewstone, 1990; Pettigrew, 1979). — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 4431

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: the MOC “The Wound of the Label: When Knowing Someone Becomes a Way of Erasing Them”; the MOC “The False Compass: How Racial Categories Reorder Bodies, Minds, and the Self”