Let's admit it. People stereotype people
Deep Roles: A theory of Implicit Characters in Social Cognition, Stories and Life

On November 3rd 1996, at one of Europe's biggest personnel and leadership conferences (at the World Trade Center in Stockholm), I was surprised to learn that my seminar on Deep roles became the best attended of the altogether 85 delivered seminars. It had to be moved to the nearby Oscar Theatre. 305 professionals were seated in front of the theatre stage. I was nervous as a trapped cat.  A blood vessel in my nose bursted. At the same time,  my best friend called. I answered the phone. The bleeding stopped. I entered the stage. This marked the start of the rollout of the Deep Role model in Scandinavia. 

In the years that followed, Scandinavian leaders learned - from open lectures, management programs, a book, and leading newspapers (1)  (2) - to recognize their more or less unconscious biases to categorizing people into deep roles.  

What are deep roles? 

Deep roles are implicit personality types. Deep roles are categorical imperatives of the "thinking fast" mode. Forming strong and simplistic impressions, or caricatures, of each other's personalities is something we do all the time. Categorizing people into good and bad characters might feel revealing  - however, is often utterly unfair. The world would probably become a better place without deep role attributions. However, I'm not quite sure about that. 

Here is the model. 

The Deep Role Model is founded on three psychological imperatives that are generally accepted in psychological science, namely
1) The first dimension on which we automatically categorize others is their gender (male, female - and, recently, - trans).
2) The second dimension on which we categorize (evaluate) others is their likeability, i.e., the valency dimension (good-bad).
3) The third dimension on which we categorize (evaluate) others is their power, i.e., the hierarchy dimension (dominance-submission). 

Together, these three implicit imperatives create a template of 14 core role-stereotypes in the mind's eye (see figures below). They are the archetypes of implisit social cognition; they are the prototypes of fantasies about persons. But most importantly, they strive to become"real" (reified) in daily social life.  

Management pioneer Warren Bennis and organizational theorist Ian Mitroff were the first scholars outside of Scandinavia to refer to my deep role model (in their 1989 book The unreality industry. Oxford Univ. Press , pp. 133-137). I wrote a  book on deep roles; sorry, in Norwegian and Swedish editions only, revised 2013. An easy-to-read conference-paper on deep roles is here. A peer reviewed conceptual article on deep roles  is here, and an empirical one is here. Both articles are published in top-tier academic journals.  

"Your deep role typology is one of the best typologies I have ever seen. It is theoretically clear, is based on sound theory, and is most intriguing to think about."  Professor Edgar H. Schein, Sloan Fellows Professor of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.), Cambridge. (Personal communication, letter of January 5th, 1988).

"If Paul Moxnes gave me his list of 14 deep roles and asked me to check the one that seemed closest to his performance in his journal article on "Understanding Roles" (Moxnes, 1999), I would check "spiritual helper." He appears as a wise man who would like us to be aware that some of these 14 roles will arise when there is trouble in relationships in groups and group members present themselves not as the complex beings that they really are but as unidimensional stereotypes." Professor A. Paul Hare,  Ben-Gurion University of the Negev  (Hare, 1999).

How come that deep roles are in the world? From an evolutionary psychological perspective, the attribution of deep roles is a hardwired perceptual instinct of our species, an adaptive cognitive device in terms of information and knowledge about others which was retained by natural selection because of its ultimate survival and reproductive payoffs. When societies became larger (more than 100 persons or so), substantive person-knowledge became replaced by person-stereotypes (Todorov, 2017). This perceptual instinct facilitated an adaptive categorization among foraging people in a world where order and arrangement of objects and events could not be prefigured. Deep roles as a cognitive device helped make sense of a turbulent environment. Deep roles became useful tools in terms of interpreting and reconstructing realities. Constructing deep roles is a more or less unconscious process of building external representations of internal worlds,

Thus, perceiving people as stereotypes are products of our evolutionary past.  The 14 deep roles are construing a functional map of sensemaking social relationships. They come in many shapes and forms. To make deep roles more apprehensible, I have named them after some core fairytale roles.