Lecture 9 / Applying and Changing Stereotypes

Stereotype Consequences

Stereotypes directly impact emotions, information processing (perception and inferences), and behavior (leading to discrimination). This process is activated by visual or social cues regarding a person's category membership.

Stereotype Activation

Socially categorizing someone automatically activates a network of related elements, including specific expected emotions, characteristics, and behavioral intentions. Multiple people are not needed to trigger this; a single person can do it.

Automatic Stereotyping

Once activated, a stereotype's content directly dictates social judgments. Activating one element primes the others and forces attention onto them while inhibiting unrelated associations, which strengthens existing biases.

Police Officer's Dilemma

A video game simulation testing split-second shoot/don't shoot judgments based on race, which demonstrates how automatic stereotyping takes over in high-stakes environments.

Cognitive Load and Stereotypes

People rely heavily on stereotypes when under time pressure or dealing with a heavy cognitive load.

Emotions and Stereotypes

High emotional arousal significantly increases stereotyping.

Power and Stereotypes

How power affects stereotyping has contradictory results, depending entirely on the specific goals of the powerful person.

Implicit Association Tests (IAT)

A psychological tool designed to measure automatic, non-conscious stereotypic associations by having users rapidly sort words and faces.

Criticisms of the IAT

The IAT's results are easily biased by the test-taker's current situation, and many rapid associations are just cultural products rather than signs of genuine internal prejudice.

Implicit vs. Explicit Attitudes

Implicit attitudes control spontaneous, non-conscious behavior (like nonverbal communication), while explicit attitudes dictate conscious behavior (like verbal communication).

The Suppression Backfire

Conscious suppression of stereotypes only has a temporary effect and often causes a "backfire effect" where the bias comes back stronger.

Motivation for Correcting Prejudice

Having a high internal and low external motivation profile is the most efficient way to correct prejudiced behavior.

The Over-Correction Risk

Forcing a conscious positive attitude to replace a negative one carries the risk of establishing a positive attitude without a realistic base.

Best Method to Reduce Prejudice

Actively activating counterstereotypical information and building real associations between those positive characteristics and the outgroup.

Stereotyping & Systematic Information Processing

People spot and memorize confirming examples to validate stereotypes, use different standards for different information, and constrain evidence to fit the stereotype (self-fulfilling prophecy).

Stereotype Threat

When someone belongs to a negatively evaluated group, anxiety over the awareness of that stereotype can undermine their performance.

Contact Hypothesis (Gordon Allport, 1954)

Certain types of direct contact between hostile groups will reduce prejudice, but only if there is equal status, mutual goals, cooperation, and approval of the broad social environment.

Explaining it Away

A mechanism for defending stereotypes that involves making an external attribution to justify why a person acted differently. It can be cured by consistent contradictory behavior across different situations.

Creating Subtype Categories

Defending a stereotype by creating a specific subtype for exceptions, allowing the higher-level outgroup stereotype to remain intact. It can be cured if there is prevalent contradictory behavior demonstrated with the out-group.

Contrast Effect

A cognitive bias where a contradictory group member is considered an extraordinary exception and an individual rather than a group member. It can be cured by emphasizing the person's typical characteristics to reintegrate them into the group perception