Stereotypes and Prototypes: The Causes and Consequences of Intersectional Invisibility

Abstract

Although sociologists and legal scholars have posited that the marginalization of Black women stems from disadvantage that emerges at the intersection of race and gender (Crenshaw, 1989), psychologists have only recently begun to generate individual-level theories to help explain this phenomenon. One such theory is the intersectional invisibility model (Purdie-Vaughns & Eibach, 2008), which suggests that the non-prototypicality of Black women, in terms of both race and gender, leads to invisibility and subsequent marginalization. Newer research, however, suggests that non-prototypicality should be considered not only with respect to race or gender, but in terms of the relationship between these two social categories, as Black individuals are considered more masculine than—and Asian individuals more feminine than—White individuals (Galinsky, Hall, & Cuddy, 2013). Indeed, studies have found support for the invisibility of Black women, who are non-prototypical in terms of their gendered-race prototype (Sesko & Biernat, 2010) and for the invisibility of Asian men, who are similarly non-prototypical (Schug, Alt, & Klauer, 2015). The proposed studies are an attempt to reconcile the intersectional invisibility model with gendered race theory by examining whether it is the perceptions of non-prototypicality that lead to invisibility (Study 1), identifying possible mechanisms for this relation (Study 2), and finally, examining whether non-prototypicality and subsequent invisibility indeed lead to marginalization as predicted by the model (Study 3).