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This thesis asks the research question In what ways do gender stereotypes inform the thoughts and actions of CCTV control room operators? Initially inspired by the problem of women’s lesser criminality, this research employs a police Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) control room ethnography to enable an exploration of the ways in which CCTV operators construct and interpret crime/deviance and sex/gender and what gender stereotypes they use to make sense of what they see on their screens. The fieldwork undertaken produces a social phenomenology of CCTV operators’ perceptions of potential crime/deviance, how these are gendered and their effects on surveillance practices. A framework for data analysis was iteratively developed. The themes it covers are: biological essentialism, social constructionism and the everyday reconciliation of theoretical problems through pragmatic solutions in the lived experience. These conceptual frames, drawn from criminological and gender theory, usefully allow the rethinking of gendered criminality/deviance and integral stereotyping. The interpretation of research findings using this framework indicates that operators' decision making is heavily based on stereotypes of sex/gender that are constructed through, and help to construct, corresponding incidences of crime/deviance, as well as a CCTV control room workplace culture. More specifically, the findings suggest that there are significant co-dependencies and co- productions of crime/deviance and sex/gender, which result in corresponding concepts and practices, and thus affinities between lay and academic theorising. These conclusions point to a need for further examination of the important consequences of assumptions contained in socially constructed stereotypes of sex/gender, especially in the context of social processes pertaining to crime/deviance, and their academic analysis and representation.

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This study investigated changes in the content and favourability of South African racial stereotypes over the past fifty years, with van den Berghe’s (1962) study providing baseline data. The scope of the current investigation was expanded to include investigations of stereotype uniformity, differences between personal and cultural stereotypes, and the degree to which racial subtypes overlap with global racial categories. The findings reflected an interesting change in the descriptive language used by the respondent groups between the two studies. At the same time, many trends observed in the van den Berghe (1962) study have persisted today. Stereotypes appear to be at least as (if not more) negative now than in 1962, with the exception of ‘English whites’ and ‘city blacks’, which were described more favourably in the present study. A significant difference between cultural and personal stereotypes was found for the global racial categories (black, white, Indian, coloured), but not for the two subtype groups (English and Afrikaans white; city and rural black). Thus there was only partial evidence to support Devine and Elliot’s (1995) hypothesis, which proposes that cultural stereotypes may remain relatively stable over time while personal stereotypes may undergo revision. The rural black subtype was most evidently reflected in the global black category, whereas the white global category seemed to be more of an aggregate of the English and Afrikaans white subtypes. Through investigating stereotypes using various methods outlined in this thesis, it was possible to assess shifts in people’s perceptions in response to sociopolitical change in South Africa over the past 16 years.

The current study examined stereotype threat or lift (STL) in terms of various elements of social identity theory. STL occurs when a negative stereotype (or positive stereotype) about a group leads to a decrease (or increase) in performance on a task that the group identifies with. The primary focus was the relationship between STL and identifiability, whereby identifiability refers to whether one views one‟s self as an individual or as an anonymous part of a social group. The study examined STL in relation to humanities and science students‟ ability to recognise patterns using two short forms of the Raven‟s Advanced Progressive Matrices (APM) which was developed. The students completed matrices under two conditions; anonymity and visibility to an audience (in-group, out-group and experimenter). When visible, participants performed significantly better than when anonymous, regardless of the STL condition. When examining in-group identification, participants with high in-group identification experienced traditional STL effects while participants with low in-group identification experienced a reversal in effects. / Thesis (M.Soc.Sc.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2009.

Age stereotypes have been associated with patterns of communication toward older adults as well as an individual s impression of older adults. Thus far, researchers have not explored these associations using paradigms in which participants engage interactively with the target; rather, studies have placed participants in the role of an objective observer of the target. The current study made use of a simulated communication paradigm to examine change in age stereotype activation, communication patterns and the impressions that are formed of an older adult target over the course of an interaction. Target individuals were portrayed either very positively (as a healthy active older adult) or more negatively (as an unwell stereotypical older adult). The competence of the target was manipulated to examine the effect of this trait on stereotype activation, communication and impressions. Individuals of all ages were found to initially speak in an affirmative way to the older adult target, regardless of initial impression, and then adjusted their speech to reflect the competency of the target. Impressions reflected both initial impressions as well as information gained from the interactive task; middle-aged and older adults focused on diagnostic information while young adults made use of all available information to inform their judgments.

Stereotype threat refers to the pressure that individuals feel when they are at risk of confirming a demeaning stereotype about themselves. Research has found that stereotype threat impairs performance on cognitive-based tasks by inducing mental interference (e.g., Schmader & Johns, 2003). This thesis hypothesised that this finding would generalise to driving and that drivers who are better able to inhibit cognitive interference (i.e., with better inhibitory ability) would be less susceptible to the disruptive effect of stereotype threat than drivers who are less able (i.e., with poorer inhibitory ability). A series of three experiments conducted in a driving simulator tested the predictions using the gender stereotype of driving skills and investigated the interpretation of the results. The experiments revealed that stereotype threat exerted both a facilitative and debilitative influence on driving performance, as indicated by different performance measures. The facilitative effect diminished when drivers experienced increased mental demands or when they were assessed by an unexpected performance measure, while the debilitative effect was more likely observed among drivers who received negative feedback than drivers who received positive feedback. Moreover, the results supported the prediction that inhibitory ability would moderate the detrimental impact of stereotype threat as the performance of drivers with poorer inhibitory ability was impeded more than that of drivers with better inhibitory ability. Regarding the processes underlying the present findings, the experiments provided suggestive evidence that stereotype threat elicits cognitive interference and simultaneously motivates drivers to concentrate on particular performance areas in an attempt to refute the stereotype. In combination, these processes appear to be at least partly responsible for the performance deficits and boosts observed.