Who-said-what errors reveal that race and gender categories override individuality

Evidence

Emblematic of the activated concept with a “close and immediate tie” (p. 21) to what people see is the category-confusion or who-said-what paradigm (Taylor, Fiske, Etcoff, & Ruderman, 1978), an early demonstration of social categories’ power. In meetings, people often misattribute one person’s suggestion to another person, but the errors systematically confuse speakers within gender and race, as if, for example, all the women or all the blacks are interchangeable. This is the hallmark of categorical perception; when people tag comments by race or gender, they neglect the individual. Category errors are not merely annoying; they reflect prejudice. They increase both when the category reinforces stereotypic roles or attitudes and when people are prejudiced (Fiske, 1998). — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 295

Categorization

• CANDY: Compact experimental finding easy to describe: people mix up who said what within genders and races in meetings—a concrete demonstration that categorization erases individuals.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 295