A recurrent connectionist model of group biases

Abstract

Major biases and stereotypes in group judgments are reviewed and modeled from a recurrent connec- tionist perspective. These biases are in the areas of group impression formation (illusory correlation), group differentiation (accentuation), stereotype change (dispersed vs. concentrated distribution of incon- sistent information), and group homogeneity. All these phenomena are illustrated with well-known experiments, and simulated with an autoassociative network architecture with linear activation update and delta learning algorithm for adjusting the connection weights. All the biases were successfully reproduced in the simulations. The discussion centers on how the particular simulation specifications compare with other models of group biases and how they may be used to develop novel hypotheses for testing the connectionist modeling approach and, more generally, for improving theorizing in the field of social biases and stereotype change.