Stereotypes and prejudice: The Australian experience

Abstract

Recently, Devine has argued against the inevitability of prejudice perspective, proposing that stereotypes and personal beliefs should be conceptualized as separate cognitive components. The present paper reports on two studies which explore this issue in relation to stereotypes of and prejudice towards Australian Aborigines. In the first study, respondents (N = 165) were asked to give open‐ended responses regarding the cultural stereotype of Australian Aborigines. These responses were then compared to the respondents' level of prejudice towards this social group. Consistent with Devine's predictions, few significant differences emerged between low‐and high‐prejudiced subjects and category descriptions of the stereotype. The second study investigated the extent to which, and the speed with which, high‐and low‐prejudice people endorsed and rejected various components of the stereotype. A response time study in which subjects responded to a list of negative, positive and situational descriptions of the Aborigine stereotype found that subjects high in prejudice were more likely to endorse the negative components, and subjects low in prejudice were more likely to endorse the positive and sociological components of the Aborigine stereotype. This effect also generalized to positive and negative descriptions of Aborigines which were not stereotype‐linked. Response time patterns indicated that high‐prejudice subjects endorsed the negative descriptions significantly faster than low‐prejudice subjects, and low‐prejudice subjects endorsed the positive descriptions significantly faster than the high‐prejudice group. In comparison to high‐prejudice subjects, low‐prejudice subjects took significantly longer to reject positive descriptions than negative descriptions of Aborigines. These findings suggest that cognitive models of stereotype activation are alone insufficient for understanding the conscious processing of stereotype‐linked information more specifically, and in understanding prejudice more generally. Beliefs and the evaluation and affect associated with these beliefs are equally important.