Do People Remember What Is Prototypical? The Role of Accent–Religion Intersectionality for Individual and Category Memory

Abstract

Evidence suggests that accents can be typically more powerful in activating ethnicity categorization than appearance. Concurrently, some social categories, such as ethnicity, can be linked with other categories, such as religion. We investigate how people categorize those who belong to a (mis)matching pair of categories? In the present study, we investigated Germans’ categorization of women either wearing a headscarf (Muslim religious symbol), or not, and speaking either standard German or German with an Arabic accent. The “Who Said What?” paradigm and multinomial modelling yielded that category memory, indicative of subtyping, was best for nonprototypical targets (i.e., headscarf and standard German accent, no headscarf and Arabic accent). In contrast, in-group targets (no headscarf and standard German accent) were individually remembered better than all other targets, whereas nonprototypical targets (no-headscarf and Arabic accent) were not remembered individually at all. These findings are discussed in terms of intersectionality and category prototypicality.