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Age, gender and race are by many researchers referred to as the three primitive categories used when you perceive others. Kurzban, Tooby and Cosmides (2001), however, doubt the status of race as a primitive category. In their 2001 study, they argue, on the basis of six experiments, that race is a byproduct of categorizing in terms of coalition. In this master's thesis, we replicated the study of Kurzban et al. (2001) to ascertain whether the same effect can be observed. By replicating the experiment of Kurzban et al. (2001), we wanted to examine the status of race. A first - high powered - replication study was conducted in the USA. A second replication study was performed in Flanders. The methods and materials of both replications were the same; only the adopted language differed. In the two conditions of both experiments, participants first saw a discussion between two basketball teams on the basis of written sentences and photographs of the players. In the instructions preceding the conversation, participants were asked to form an impression of the players. After this first phase, the participants were presented with a short distractor task. In the last phase of the experiment, a surprise recall task followed where the participants had to match the right photograph and sentence from the first phase again. The difference between both conditions was that in the first condition, also called the verbal cue condition, participants could only use the verbal utterances the players made to determine team membership. However, in the second condition, the visual cue condition, team membership was indicated by means of different t-shirt colors (grey and yellow) so participants could not only use verbal cues but also visual cues. In the last phase of the experiment, participants obviously made a lot of errors, i.e. a mismatch between a sentence and a photograph. Four types of errors were possible (same team same race, different team same race, same team different race and different team different race), wherefrom two scores (coalitional encoding and racial encoding) could be derived. These errors and scores are essential when analyzing the results. In the USA study, we observed the same effect (but with lower effect sizes) as Kurzban et al. (2001), that is a decrease in racial encoding and an increase in coalitional encoding when visual cues (i.e. different t-shirt colors) are present. In the Flemish study, we observed a similar effect for coalition encoding, but an insignificant effect for racial encoding. This insignificant effect could be due to the low power of the study (the sample size was too small). Another hypothetical explanation could be the difference in social context, as blacks have another status in America than in Europe/Belgium.
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