GI $
LEARNING FROM TEXTBOOKS 215confederacies that flourished in what is today Germany, Italy,
the Netherlands, and Switzerland. Federalism is more
modern; it was developed first in the United States and later
was adopted by one third of the countries of the world,
including the Soviet Union, Brazil, India, Nigeria, Mexico,
Switzerland, Yugoslavia, West Germany, Canada, and
Australia.^6Type of representation:Passage 3Three different accounts have been proposed to explain why
stereotypes develop. The first, the shared distinctiveness
account, is a purely cognitive account; it proposes that the
tendency to form stereotypes of people is a natural conse-
quence of the way we process information. In particular,
David Hamilton has proposed that a phenomenon well-
known in general psychology, the illusory correlation, can
explain the development and maintenance of stereotypes
without needing to posit that we have any motivational
biases at all with regard to our thinking about groups of
people. The second account also sees stereotypes as a con-
sequence of the way we think about people, but it suggests
that stereotyping depends on our having categorized people
into ingroups and outgroups. The essence of this account,
the outgroup homogeneity account, is that once we divide
people into ingroups and outgroups, we are likely to form
stereotypes of the outgroups. The third account, the cultural
account, argues that we cannot understand the stereotypes
we have of various groups in cognitive terms alone; it sug-
gests that the stereotypes we have are a consequence of the
specific way our culture has structured interactions between
ingroups and outgroups. According to this view, the history
of a culture determines the particular content that various
stereotypes have. Let us consider these explanations one at
a time.^7(^6) From Pious, R. M. (1986). American Politics and Government. New York: McGraw-Hill.
p. 64, 66.
(^7) From Sabini, U. (1995). Social Psychology (2nd ed.). New York: Norton, p. 125.