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2 HAMILTON AND SHERMAN of various ethnic groups. Although seemingly simple, these questions cut to the heart of the nature and functioning of stereotypes. They are questions of both societal and scientific concern and have been for a long time. Despite their im portance, neither society nor science has dealt adequately with the issues and problems that these questions raise.

This chapter assesses what we have learned about some of those issues from social psychological research, and particularly from research guided by a social cognition approach to the topic. Our review and analysis is organized around questions much like those posed earlier. However, we shall see that, when ap proached scientifically, these broad questions actually mask a number of more specific questions, each of which presents its own issues for analysis. A decade ago, Ashmore and Del Boca (1981) provided a useful summary of …