April 2009 Archives

Do we "get" people who belong to our same ethnic group better than people who belong to other groups?

Stereotype theorists have always assumed this is true, but they never actually tested it - not like we can on YouJustGetMe.

Care to help?

First, record your own ethnicity so we can analyze if it affects guessing accuracy. Just go to the bottom of the "Edit my Clues" page and choose your ethnicity in the “my ethnicity as others define it” menu. During the study ethnicity will appear randomly on some profiles and not others.

Second, let us know what personality stereotypes you believe exist in our culture about different groups. We have created seven fake profiles of entire ethnic groups - all you have to do is to guess them.

African Peoples

Arab Peoples

Asian Peoples

Caucasian Peoples

Latin Peoples

Multi-Racial Peoples

Native Peoples

All of these fake profiles had to rate themselves, so we put in a common cultural stereotype that we learned from research that Dr. Peggy conducted with David in 2005. That means when you get your usual "accuracy score", it will indicate whether you are influenced by the same cultural stereotypes as the people in the 2005 study.

If enough people participate, soon you'll be able to learn how much stereotypes are affecting your guess of individual people!

Thanks for being a part of our cutting-edge research!