Abstract

Effects of strengthened processing strategies on the judgment about social groups were investigated with categorization task. Across experiment 1 and 2, the processing strategies for categorizing targets by exemplar or abstract information, participants were asked to perform repeatedly the categorization task. Experiment 1 assessed what effects the strengthened processing strategies would have on categorizing social groups with different contents. Those who relied on the abstract-information-based strategy in categorization judgments used this information as a basis of the categorization judgments of new social groups. Similarly, those who used repeatedly the exemplar information used it as basis of categorization judgments. These findings indicate that the strengthened processing strategies affect selecting information to be used in categorization judgment of new social groups. Experiment 2 was conducted to estimate the effect of one strengthened processing strategy on the usage of the other non-strengthened one. Those participants who were attuned to the processing strategy based on the abstract information made more judgment errors in the categorization judgments when they were instructed to use exemplar than abstract information, but not vice versa. These results implicate that the strengthened processing strategy based on abstract information confines the kind of information to be used in the categorization judgments, and that the abstract information would be dominant over the exemplar one.