Finding Our Way in the Social World: Exploring the Dimensions Underlying Social Classification
In: Social psychology, Volume 44, Issue 5, p. 329-348
ISSN: 2151-2590
People readily use social categories in their daily interactions with others. Although many scholars have focused on social categorization, they have largely neglected the cognitive representation of stimuli as a basis of this process. The present work aims to determine what dimensions are commonly used to organize the social world. The main dimensions of the social mental map are extracted from sorting data pertaining to a wide variety of social stimuli. Dimensions reflecting conventionalism, age, gender, physical versus cognitive orientation, warmth, and deviance are revealed. Furthermore, we show important individual differences in the extent to which each of these dimensions are attended to. We also establish the stability and reliability of our findings in a follow-up and a replication study.