Social categories like race and gender often give rise to stereotypes and prejudice, and a great deal of research has focused on how motivations influence these biased beliefs. Here, we focus on potential biases in how these categories are even formed in the first place, suggesting that motivations can influence the very categories people use to group others. We propose that motivations to share schemas with other people and to gain resources shape people's attention to dimensions like race, gender, and age in different contexts. Specifically, people will pay attention to dimensions to the degree that the conclusions produced from using those dimensions align with their motivations. Overall, we suggest that simply examining the downstream effects of social categorization like stereotyping and prejudice is not enough, and that research should look earlier in the process at how and when we form the categories on which those stereotypes are based.

中文翻译：

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动机类别：社会结构通过注意机制塑造社会类别的构建。

种族和性别等社会类别常常会引起刻板印象和偏见，大量研究都集中在动机如何影响这些偏见信念上。在这里，我们首先关注这些类别如何形成的潜在偏见，这表明动机可以影响人们用来对他人进行分组的类别。我们提出，与他人分享模式和获取资源的动机会影响人们在不同背景下对种族、性别和年龄等维度的关注。具体来说，人们会关注维度，直到使用这些维度得出的结论与他们的动机相符。总的来说，我们建议仅仅检查刻板印象和偏见等社会分类的下游影响是不够的，研究应该在这个过程中更早地研究我们如何以及何时形成这些刻板印象所基于的类别。