Automatic Stereotype Activation Research Articles

Ego—Depletion and Prejudice: Separating Automatic and Controlled Components

Abstract This study investigated the effect of ego—depletion on the automatic and controlled components of stereotype—based responses. Participants engaged in a depleting task for either a short or a long period of time. They then performed a weapon identification task, which served as a measure of race stereotyping. Analyses guided by the L.L. Jacoby's (1991) process dissociation procedure indicated that ego—depletion reduced the controlled component of responses, but did not affect the automatic component. Further, ego—depletion increased stereotypical responses only among those participants who showed strong automatic stereotype activation. The discussion focuses on methodologically and theoretically integrating notions of self—control and cognitive control.

Implicit cognition is impaired and dissociable in a head-injured group with executive deficits

Implicit or non-conscious cognition is traditionally assumed to be robust to pathology but Gomez-Beldarrain et al. recently showed deficits on a single implicit task after head injury. Laboratory research suggests that implicit processes dissociate. This study therefore examined implicit cognition in 20 head-injured patients and age- and IQ-matched controls using a battery of four implicit cognition tasks: a serial reaction time task (SRT), mere exposure effect task, automatic stereotype activation and hidden co-variation detection. Patients were assessed on an extensive neuropsychological battery, and MRI scanned. Inclusion criteria included impairment on at least one measure of executive function. The patient group was impaired relative to the control group on all the implicit cognition tasks except automatic stereotype activation. Effect size analyses using the control mean and standard deviation for reference showed further dissociations across patients and across implicit tasks. Patients impaired on implicit tasks had more cognitive deficits overall than those unimpaired, and a larger dysexecutive self/other discrepancy (DEX) score suggesting greater behavioural problems. Performance on the SRT task correlated with a composite measure of executive function. Head injury thus produced heterogeneous impairments in the implicit acquisition of new information. Implicit activation of existing knowledge structures appeared intact. Impairments in implicit cognition and executive function may interact to produce dysfunctional behaviour after head injury. Future comparisons of implicit and explicit cognition should use several measures of each function, to ensure that they measure the latent variable of interest.

Conceptualizing Control in Social Cognition: How Executive Functioning Modulates the Expression of Automatic Stereotyping.

Two studies investigated the role of executive control in moderating the relationship between automatic stereotype activation and behavioral responses. Race bias in weapon identification was used to measure stereotyping, and a process dissociation procedure was used to measure automatic and controlled components of performance. In Experiment 1, the controlled component was shown to correlate with general attention control and race-specific motivations to control prejudice. Across multiple measures, automatic race bias was more likely to be expressed as behavioral discrimination among individuals with poor executive control. Experiment 2 found the same relationship between automatic and controlled components of behavior when predicting impressions of a Black individual. Executive control is discussed in the context of other control strategies in influential dual-process models of stereotyping.

Don’t stereotype, think different! Overcoming automatic stereotype activation by mindset priming

Automatic stereotype activation can be overcome intentionally and after an extensive training. However, intentions have to be tailored to a certain social category. It is hypothesized that activating the mindset “think different” by priming creativity prevents stereotypes and associations in general from becoming automatically activated. In two experiments a creative, a thoughtful or no mindset was activated. Afterwards, the activation of associations was measured using a lexical decision task with semantic priming. As predicted, the automatic activation of stereotypes (Study 1) and other associations (Study 2) was found in the control conditions but not in a creative mindset. These results suggest that people possess a mindset that allows for overcoming automatic stereotype activation without being tailored to a specific category.

The Social Psychology of Stigma

This chapter addresses the psychological effects of social stigma. Stigma directly affects the stigmatized via mechanisms of discrimination, expectancy confirmation, and automatic stereotype activation, and indirectly via threats to personal and social identity. We review and organize recent theory and empirical research within an identity threat model of stigma. This model posits that situational cues, collective representations of one's stigma status, and personal beliefs and motives shape appraisals of the significance of stigma-relevant situations for well-being. Identity threat results when stigma-relevant stressors are appraised as potentially harmful to one's social identity and as exceeding one's coping resources. Identity threat creates involuntary stress responses and motivates attempts at threat reduction through coping strategies. Stress responses and coping efforts affect important outcomes such as self-esteem, academic achievement, and health. Identity threat perspectives help to explain the tremendous variability across people, groups, and situations in responses to stigma.

Automatic Activation of Yellow Peril Asian American Stereotypes: Effects on Social Impression Formation

The authors randomly assigned 69 undergraduates to 1 of 2 perceptual priming conditions involving 80-ms flash words presented on a computer screen to activate information processing outside of conscious awareness. In the high-prime condition, the authors exposed participants to stereotype words associated with the Yellow Peril view of Asian Americans. The authors exposed participants in a low-prime condition to neutral words. All participants then read a vignette and evaluated its protagonist on several social dimensions. Results indicated that the priming procedure effectively biased participant evaluation of the vignette target, but only on items closely linked to Asian Americans. Contrary to predictions, however, participants in the high-prime group rated the target less Asian than did their low-prime group counterparts, an apparent reversal of the expected priming effect. The authors discussed theoretical implications.

Examination of the Self-Regulation Mechanism: Prejudice Reduction in Pre-Service Teachers

Teachers, like other members in society, hold racial stereotypes and prejudices. This study examined the use of self-regulation to reduce prejudice among pre-service teachers through instruction in a stand-alone multicultural education course. Researchers identified stereotypes held by pre-service teachers and then taught self-regulation strategies, so novice teachers could address and then eliminate their own prejudices and biases. The intervention included a projective visualization to heighten awareness of stereotypes and a service-learning project with low-income families in a naturalistic setting. Quantitative analysis of the pre-service teachers' responses to the visualization exercise demonstrated the pervasiveness and strength of their stereotypes. Irrespective of their own gender or ethnic identity, respondents tended to see a tall, white male in response to the word American, thus overriding the participant's own identity. This finding supports Devine's theoretical position on the automatic activation of stereotypes (Devine et al., 1991). Qualitative analysis of the pre-service teachers' responses to strategic questions focusing on racial prejudice linked to the service-learning activity showed that almost half of the respondents exhibited self-regulation, and some of their responses included feelings of self-displeasure that suggest prejudice reduction through self-regulation. These results are among the first to support the applicability of Monteith, Devine and Zuwerink's (1993) self-regulation theory to prejudice reduction in teaching environments, and suggest the feasibility of reducing prejudice among pre-service teachers through higher education coursework.

Automatic stereotypes vs. automatic prejudice: Sorting out the possibilities in the weapon paradigm

Payne (2001) has documented that African-American faces automatically facilitate the categorization of handguns, relative to White faces. We suggest that these provocative results could derive from either the automatic activation of prejudice (negative evaluations) or the automatic activation of stereotypes (both positively and negatively valenced associations). In an extension of Payne’s procedure, we show that African-American faces facilitate the categorization of both handguns and sports-related objects, but not the categorization of insects or fruits. Additionally, both handguns and sports objects are more likely to be miscategorized following a White face prime than an African-American one. These results suggest that when perceivers are attempting to identify objects, automatic stereotypic associations, both positively and negatively valenced ones, are more influential than general negative sentiments towards African-Americans.

The Role Of Awareness: Divergent Automatic Stereotype Activation And Implicit Judgment Correction

Two experiments investigated automatic stereotype activation and its correction. In Experiment 1 (n = 57) the category “Blacks” was primed using a lexical decision task. People high and low in prejudice subsequently formed divergent impressions of the target person. Replicating previous findings (Lepore & Brown, 1997), high-prejudice participants' judgments were more negative and low-prejudice people's ratings more positive. Awareness of a connection between priming and impression formation reversed this pattern. Experiment 2 (n = 40) revealed that awareness of a connection, irrespective of priming recall, promoted a correction of the judgment. Unaware high- and low-prejudice participants again showed divergent automatic stereotype activation, but aware respondents corrected their judgments in opposite directions. Thus, when automatic stereotype activation is differentiated, implicit correction processes act upon different accessible knowledge, resulting in divergent judgment corrections. Implications for stereotyping and models of contrast effects are discussed.

ARTICLE REVIEW

This study investigated differences between general nurses, psychiatric nurses and lay people, in relation to their personal standards concerning, and beliefs about, how they should respond to people with schizophrenia. Evidence of these differences is examined in the following three domains: thinking, feeling and behaving. Significant differences were identified between the response types and the different response domains. Significant interaction effects were also identified based on participants' professional status in nursing. The authors argue that their results support Devine's (1989) theory concerning the automatic activation of stereotypes and their controlled inhibition in favour of different personal beliefs. The authors additionally argue that professional socialization in psychiatric nursing facilitates this process in relation to people with schizophrenia.

Just say no (to stereotyping): effects of training in the negation of stereotypic associations on stereotype activation.

The primary aim of the present research was to examine the effect of training in negating stereotype associations on stereotype activation. Across 3 studies, participants received practice in negating stereotypes related to skinhead and racial categories. The subsequent automatic activation of stereotypes was measured using either a primed Stroop task (Studies I and 2) or a person categorization task (Study 3). The results demonstrate that when receiving no training or training in a nontarget category stereotype, participants exhibited spontaneous stereotype activation. After receiving an extensive amount of training related to a specific category, however, participants demonstrated reduced stereotype activation. The results from the training task provide further evidence for the impact of practice on participants' proficiency in negating stereotypes.

Implicit stereotyping and prejudice and the primed Stroop task

In the present study, automatic stereotype activation related to racial categories was examined utilizing a primed Stroop task. The speed of participants' ink-color naming of stereotypic and nonstereotypic target words following Black and White category primes were compared: slower naming times are presumed to reflect interference from automatic activation. The results provide support for automatic activation of implicit prejudice and stereotypes. With respect to prejudice, naming latencies tended to be slower for positive words following White than Black primes and slower for negative words following Black than White primes. With regard to stereotypes, participants demonstrated slower naming latencies for Black stereotypes, primarily those that were negatively valenced, following Black than White category primes. These findings provide further evidence of the automatic activation of stereotypes and prejudice that occurs without intention.

Automatic Activation of Stereotypes: The Role of Self-Image Threat

Does self-image threatening feedback make perceivers more likely to activate stereotypes when confronted by members of a minority group? Participants in Study 1 saw an Asian American or European American woman for several minutes, and participants in Studies 2 and 3 were exposed to drawings of an African American or European American male face for fractions of a second. These experiments found no evidence of automatic stereotype activation when perceivers were cognitively busy and when they had not received negative feedback. When perceivers had received negative feedback, however, evidence of stereotype activation emerged even when perceivers were cognitively busy. The theoretical implications of these results for stereotype activation and the relationship of motivation, affect, and cognition are discussed.

Nurses' responses to people with schizophrenia.

General nurses, psychiatric nurses and lay people were investigated to identify differences between their personal standards concerning how they should respond, and beliefs about how they actually would respond, towards the target group, 'people with schizophrenia', in each of three response domains (thinking, feeling and behaving). Significant differences were identified between the response types and between the different response domains. Significant interaction effects were also identified based on participants professional status in nursing. It is argued that the results support Devine's (1989) theory concerning the automatic activation of stereotypes and their controlled inhibition in favour of different personal beliefs. It is also argued that professional specialization in psychiatric nursing facilitates this process in relation to the target group.

Nonconscious Behavioral Confirmation Processes: The Self-Fulfilling Consequences of Automatic Stereotype Activation

It is now well-established that stereotypes can become activated unintentionally and outside of awareness by the presence of the relevant group features. There is also a long tradition of theory and evidence that perceptual and behavioral processes are intimately related (e.g., Berkowitz, 1984; James, 1890; Piaget, 1948). Considering these two phenomena together suggests that stereotype activation can cause the perceiver to act in stereotype-consistent ways, and recent evidence confirms this prediction (Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996). The present study extended these findings by showing that the perceiver's stereotype-consistent behavior causes the target person to reciprocate in kind, thereby confirming the perceiver's stereotypic beliefs. Compared to a control condition, subliminal activation of the African American stereotype in participants resulted in greater hostility in their interaction partners (as rated by outside judges) and more extreme hostility ratings of the targets by their perceiver partner.

Category and stereotype activation: Is prejudice inevitable?

Three experiments tested the hypothesis that people high and low in prejudice respond similarly to direct stereotype activation but differently to category activation. Study 1 (N=40) showed that high- and low-prejudice people share the same knowledge of the stereotype of Black people. In Study 2, (N=51) high-prejudice participants formed a more negative and less positive impression of the target person after subliminal priming of the category Blacks than did participants in the no-prime condition. Low-prejudice people tended in the opposite direction. In Study 3 (N=45), both high- and low-prejudice people increased negative ratings when valenced stereotype content was also primed. These findings support a distinction between automatic stereotype activation resulting from direct priming and that consequent upon category activation, implying that the relations among categorization, stereotyping, and prejudice are more flexible than it is often assumed.

Automatic and controlled activation of stereotypes: Individual differences associated with prejudice

Devine (1989) has proposed a model which suggests that when individuals are required to evaluate stereotyped groups both low‐prejudice and high‐prejudice persons will automatically activate the pertinent stereotype content. Controlled inhibition of the content of the stereotype characterizes low‐prejudice responses and distinguishes low‐from high‐prejudice persons. The experimental evidence Devine (1989) reports to support this model is criticized on several grounds, and a methodology that avoids these shortcomings is described. Two groups of subjects were tested, one with and one without a stereotype of the target group. The results from the group knowledgeable of the stereotype were inconsistent with Devine's (1989) model. Differences in the automatic activation of stereotype content, rather than differences in the tendency to employ strategies to inhibit stereotype content, were related to levels of prejudice towards the target group. The results from a sample of subjects not possessing a stereotype of the target group confirmed the integral role of automatic processes in prejudice. Prejudice for these subjects was related to the tendency to automatically activate negative rather than positive concepts, irrespective of their relatedness to the stereotype of the target group. The implications of these findings for Devine's (1989) model and the more general nature of the relationship between stereotypes and prejudice are discussed, and the advantages of the current methodology detailed.