Beyond trait summaries: stereotypes as multimodal mental representations of groups across perceivers, situations, and intersecting categories

Stereotypes are often studied as trait summaries of groups. Yet in everyday life, people observe and represent others concretely through multiple modalities, including how others look, act, think, and feel, which are only partially captured by traits. In two pre-registered studies with U.S. representative samples (N = 1,721), we investigated multimodal stereotypes by letting participants freely describe spontaneous mental images of 9 groups across 6 situations and 30 intersections. We found both idiosyncratic perceptions and consistent cultural stereotypes. Multimodal stereotypes changed across contexts, but some elements were more rigid than others. Intersecting groups shaped multimodal stereotypes to different degrees; two exceptions were “Asian” and “unattractive”, which dominated the other intersecting groups. Across 30 intersectional groups, 27 supported the additive mechanism, and 3 showed interactive patterns. Together, these findings show that investigating stereotypes as multimodal representations is key to understanding how different elements of stereotypes change across perceivers, situations, and intersections.