Social psychologists study our perception of groups in many different ways to explore stereotypes we have of groups and the conflict or cooperative relations between different groups. In this project we are particularly interested in the way we understand and describe the subgroups or subtypes within groups. This gives us an indication of how our social knowledge about the groups is captured and represented in our memories.
Like other forms of group perception, this form of social knowledge can have important implications for the relationships between groups and subgroups across society. Our approach captures a form of social knowledge that is difficult to access in other ways and we are developing some new techniques and measures to help us understand this way in which we think about groups and subgroups.