The perception of the poor: Capturing stereotype content with different measures
Sammanfattning
Even though Sweden stands out in many ways, with for example a well-developed welfare
system, there are some indications that Swedish egalitarianism does not include tolerance for
people with low income. The present research concerns the content of the Swedish stereotype
of poor people, and examines whether the poor are associated with just as negative traits as
they are in other countries. Three different measurement methods were employed to investigate
the contents and strength of the stereotype. In Study 1, participants freely associated on the
perceived characteristics of Swedish citizens who receive welfare benefits. They also provided
ratings of this group on traits related to warmth and competence. Study 2 employed both trait
ratings and implicit measures (Single Category-IATs) in order to estimate the strength of the associations
between the poor and warmth/competence, respectively. Across the different measures,
the poor were associated with low competence and low–medium warmth. This corroborates the
findings from previous research related to the Stereotype Content Model in other countries.