Social Categorization and Stimulus Equivalence

Northern Irish Protestant subjects, Northern Irish Catholic subjects, and English Protestant subjects were taught a series of conditional discriminations using a matching-to-sample procedure. In the presence of Northern Irish Catholic names, subjects were trained to select three-letter nonsense syllables, and in the presence of the nonsense syllables subjects were trained to select Northern Irish Protestant symbols. Subjects were then tested to determine whether the Protestant symbols and Catholic names had become related through symmetry and transitivity. A generalization test was employed to allow for a preliminary investigation of the transfer of experimentally generated equivalence responding to untrained, socially loaded names. Preliminary findings suggest that prior social learning might interfere with equivalence responding. The relevance of these results to the theoretical interpretation of the equivalence phenomenon and to social attitude measurement in general is discussed.