An Information Bottleneck View of Social Stereotype Use

For decades, social psychologists have wondered about the cognitive foundations of social stereotype use. Arguments have generally centred either resource constraints, framing stereotypes as `energy-saving devices', or `fit', framing stereotypes as tools to represent real structure in the social environment that sometimes go awry. These resource-based and fit-based accounts have typically been presented as being in opposition to one another. In this paper, we seek to show that both are compatible under an information bottleneck model of agent representation. Through a simple simulation experiment, we demonstrate how stereotype use emerges in resource-rational representations as a function of both capacity constraints and the structure of the social environment. We then use the same framework to consider a possible explanation for the outgroup homogeneity bias in terms of limited cognitive capacity.