Categorization

Assigning objects or events to psychologically relevant classes. Evidence about classification speed, typicality and generalization constrains representations and decision processes, but no single behavioral effect uniquely identifies a storage format.

A tendency to treat a category as having a stable underlying nature that explains its nonobvious properties. This can support expectations beyond appearance without establishing that the assumed essence is biologically real.

Representing people as members of socially meaningful classes. Social categorization can organize expectations and identity; a category label alone does not determine whether its consequences are inclusive or prejudicial.

An arrangement in which group boundaries on different dimensions do not coincide. A former outgroup member may share another valued identity with the observer. This can soften a single division, but need not eliminate exclusion of people outside both categories.

Changing the category structure through which people represent an interaction, for example by replacing two opposed groups with one inclusive group. Recategorization should be assessed through perceived membership and behavior rather than inferred from labels alone.

An account of prejudice reduction in which former outgroup members become included in a common ingroup. The proposed mechanism extends favorable ingroup responses across a previous boundary. Whether the common identity recognizes or suppresses subgroup identity is a substantive boundary condition.

Reducing the relevance of a group boundary by individuating interaction partners. A central limitation is generalization: liking a particular person need not change prejudice toward other members of that person's outgroup.

More favorable evaluation or treatment of an ingroup than an outgroup. It should be distinguished from absolute hostility toward an outgroup and measured separately from consequential discrimination.

A group represented as excluding the self in a relevant comparison. A person can belong to a social outgroup on one dimension and share an ingroup membership on another.

A group represented as including the self in a relevant context. Which group counts as an ingroup can change with the dimension of social categorization.

Forming and interpreting a concept from other concepts. A theory of representation must explain how combined concepts acquire constraints and typical instances, including cases not captured by a simple average of their separate typical examples.

An account emphasizing defining conditions for category membership. Such criteria can coexist with graded identification or typicality effects; those effects alone do not prove the absence of a definitional representation.

An account in which classification depends on stored examples and their similarity to a new case. An unseen central case can resemble many stored examples and receive strong aggregate support, so prototype-like behavior need not imply an explicitly stored average.

An account in which category judgments rely on similarity to an abstract or representative summary. It naturally explains centrality and generalization effects, but must be distinguished from exemplar theory and from a descriptive typicality gradient.

A pattern of overlapping attributes among members without requiring one attribute set shared identically by every member. The distribution of attributes in competing categories matters as well as their occurrence within one category. Family resemblance can describe a category structure without specifying how it is learned or stored.

A central or representative summary used in a categorization account. It need not be a previously encountered individual, and its selection can depend on the modeled feature distribution, comparison classes and goals.

How representative a member seems or behaves relative to its category. Graded typicality is distinct from graded membership: well-defined mathematical categories can show unequal familiarity or identification speed despite exact membership criteria.