A sociohistorical model of intersectional social category prototypes

Abstract

Every person belongs to multiple social categories, such as those based on gender, race, or ethnicity, yet researchers have traditionally studied beliefs about each of these groups in isolation. Theoretical perspectives have emerged that aim to outline how people’s mental representations of gender and race or ethnicity are systematically intertwined. These intersectional perspectives have been generative, but there remain areas of ostensible disagreement that create conceptual confusion. In this Perspective, we suggest that a sociohistorical approach can help to reconcile these differences by highlighting how previous theories offer complementary, rather than conflicting, insights into the structure of social concepts. Specifically, we propose that a sociohistorical model integrating research across social science fields (history, anthropology, sociology and psychology) could illuminate how people construct mental representations that align with their surrounding social and cultural systems, which reflect the goals of the dominant gender and ethnic or racial group. By encoding these cultural ideals in mental representations of what members of social categories are like, people’s prototypes reinforce social hierarchies. People belong to multiple social categories (such as those based on race, ethnicity, or gender) simultaneously. In this Perspective, Lei et al. propose a sociohistorical model of intersectional social prototypes that reconciles existing theories and generates testable hypotheses about the development and structure of social prototypes.