How Communication Practices and Category Norms Lead People to Stereotype Particular People and Groups

By the end of George Orwell’s (1945) novel Animal Farm, the farm animals who have overthrown their oppressive human owners find that the egalitarian principles of their revolution are expounded in explicit declarations but not evident in practice. Along with the Communist society that Orwell lampooned, Western democracies and capitalist societies also describe themselves as providing equal rights and opportunities to all, while differentially doling those out to some more than to others. There are many causes of group-based inequality, including stereotyping, personal and institutional discrimination, and the differential psychological consequences of those processes (see Sidanius and Pratto, 1999). This chapter highlights a different contributor to social inequality, namely, asymmetries in the construction of categorical social identities and their uses.