Stereotypes: A Systematic Review of Conceptual Publications

Abstract

Studies point to stereotypes as an important phenomenon that makes up the understanding of intergroup reality, and it is widely investigated by psychology, especially for the impacts they cause in the most different areas of social life. Thus, this systematic literature review aimed to explore the conceptualization, characterization, and underlying aspects of stereotypes in psychology, based on articles and book chapters published in databases over the last 40 years. We used the descriptors with Boolean operators "theory AND stereotypes AND racial stereotypes", "racial stereotypes AND racism"; "stereotypes AND review" for the bases PsicInfo, Sage, Scopus, Science Direct and Cochrane, and the homonymous descriptors in Portuguese for the national Brazilian bases Scielo and PePSIC. From the analyzed corpus it was found that the publications hegemonically present the social psychology perspective to describe it. The conceptualization of the phenomenon is linked to the Social Identity Theory - SIT and, according to the objectives of each work, the phenomenon is presented with emphasis on different cognitive aspects, with categorization and schemas being the most used. It is concluded that although it is an apparently well explored theme, the timid publication of revision studies of the theory in databases is an aspect that deserves further investigation.