StereoDetect: Detecting Stereotypes and Anti-stereotypes the Correct Way Using Social Psychological Underpinnings

Kaustubh Shivshankar Shejole, Pushpak Bhattacharyya


Abstract
Stereotypes are known to have very harmful effects, making their detection critically important. However, current research predominantly focuses on detecting and evaluating stereotypical biases, leaving the study of stereotypes in its early stages. Our study revealed that many works have failed to clearly distinguish between stereotypes and stereotypical biases, which has significantly slowed progress in advancing research in this area. Stereotype and Anti-stereotype detection is a problem that requires social knowledge; hence, it is one of the most difficult areas in Responsible AI. This work investigates this task, where we propose a five-tuple definition and provide precise terminologies disentangling stereotypes, anti‐stereotypes, stereotypical bias, and general bias. We provide a conceptual framework grounded in social psychology for reliable detection. We identify key shortcomings in existing benchmarks for this task of stereotype and anti-stereotype detection. To address these gaps, we developed *StereoDetect*, a well curated, definition‐aligned benchmark dataset designed for this task. We show that language models with fewer than 10 billion parameters frequently misclassify anti‐stereotypes and fail to recognize neutral overgeneralizations. We demonstrate StereoDetect’s effectiveness through multiple qualitative and quantitative comparisons with existing benchmarks and models fine-tuned on them.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-emnlp.216
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4051–4082
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/author-page-yu-wang-polytechnic/2025.findings-emnlp.216/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2025.findings-emnlp.216
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kaustubh Shivshankar Shejole and Pushpak Bhattacharyya. 2025. StereoDetect: Detecting Stereotypes and Anti-stereotypes the Correct Way Using Social Psychological Underpinnings. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025, pages 4051–4082, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
StereoDetect: Detecting Stereotypes and Anti-stereotypes the Correct Way Using Social Psychological Underpinnings (Shejole & Bhattacharyya, Findings 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/author-page-yu-wang-polytechnic/2025.findings-emnlp.216.pdf
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