Stereotypes in scientific research: a tentative approach

This study aims to explore the possibility of stereotypes in scientific research. With this, we are not referring to stereotypes concerning scientist features, such as gender or race, but “epistemological” stereotypes in scientific research, especially methodologically ones and those related to ontological commitments about studied subjects. With “epistemological stereotype” we mean tendencies such as, for example, considering objects or phenomena in scientific theories as objects or phenomena of real world or just concepts in those theories. The problem is how pinpointing these possible tendencies without explicitly asking. Form this point of view, we know that stereotypes and bias could be very close or even overlapped. But, for our purposes, we will assume that we are dealing with stereotypes because they are tightly related to categorization and categorization tasks are part of some peculiar cognitive experimentation methodologies used to detect implicit connections among different categories.