Stereotype Maintenance Research Articles

When “Sometimes” Means “Often”: How Stereotypes Affect Interpretations of Quantitative Expressions

Two experiments investigated whether interpretations of quantitative expressions about described actors’ behaviors are influenced by stereotypic expectancies. Participants rated sentences containing frequency adverbs describing either stereotype-consistent or stereotype-inconsistent behaviors. Results showed that recipients inferred a higher numerical frequency when sentences described stereotype-consistent (vs inconsistent) behaviors. These effects of stereotype consistency were stronger for high (vs low) degree frequency adverbs. The findings show how neutral statements about a person can be interpreted as stereotype-confirming information and thus contribute to stereotype maintenance.

Are Women Brave or Braver Than Men? Judgments of Implicit and Explicit Intergroup Comparisons

People learn about social groups by reading and hearing verbal statements. We investigated if the perceived truth and acceptability of such statements depend on whether they are implicitly vs. explicitly comparative (e.g., “Women are brave” vs. “Women are braver than men”). Participants (Study 1: Ns = 259; Study 2: N = 246) rated the truth, acceptability, familiarity, and positivity of implicitly vs. explicitly comparative, stereotypical vs. counter-stereotypical statements about positive vs. negative features. Consistent with an Etiquette Hypothesis, implicitly (vs. explicitly) comparative statements about positive features were judged as truer and more acceptable, presumably because they adhered better to a positivity norm. Consistent with a Fluency Hypothesis, stereotypical explicitly (vs. implicitly) comparative statements about age groups were judged as truer, presumably because of higher ease-of-processing. Thus, mechanisms affecting judgments vary somewhat with the groups compared. We discuss the role of metacognitive and normative processes in stereotype maintenance and stereotype change.

Stereotypical Questions: How Stereotypes About Conversation Partners Are Reflected in Question Formulations.

In conversations, activated stereotypes about conversation partners can influence communicative behaviors. We investigate whether and how stereotypes about categorized conversation partners shape topic choice and the types of questions asked. In three experiments, participants imagined having a conversation. Gender or age stereotypes of the conversation partner were manipulated by means of a picture. Results show a higher likelihood of addressing conversation and question topics consistent with stereotypic expectancies about conversation partners. Moreover, stereotypes were reflected in subtle variations in question formulations. When questions address stereotype-consistent topics, they are likelier formulated with high-frequency adverbs and positive valence, while questions addressing stereotype-inconsistent topics more likely contain low-frequency adverbs and negative valence. In addition, Experiment 4 suggests that recipients are sensitive to detect that questions reflect stereotypes about themselves, which can influence the evaluation of the conversation and partner. We discuss the consequences of biased question asking for interpersonal conversation and stereotype maintenance.

Negation bias in communicating Asian American stereotypes

AbstractPrevious literature demonstrates how the use of negations can be used to communicate stereotypic expectations (e.g., the professor is not smart, instead of stupid). In light of the COVID‐19 pandemic and increased discrimination against Asian Americans, we tested whether the negation bias is used to communicate stereotypes about Asian Americans. Participants were provided with stereotype‐consistent, stereotype‐inconsistent, and neutral scenarios about a subject portrayed as Asian American (Studies 1 and 2), or non‐Asian American (Study 2). They were then asked to choose between two descriptions (Study 1) or to describe their impressions of the subject (Study 2). Across studies, participants were more likely to use negations when describing stereotype‐inconsistent behavior compared to stereotype‐consistent behavior of Asian Americans, supporting our predictions. Results suggest that negations play a role in communicating previously held expectations of Asian Americans and are used in stereotype maintenance.

Not up to the task: perceptions of women and men with work-family conflicts

ABSTRACT Conversations about work-family conflict are commonplace. However, most of the conversation is based on how individuals can best manage work and family demands. Little is known about how others perceive and react towards individuals who go through this experience. Building on theories of social evaluation and stereotype maintenance, we hypothesized that due to gender stereotypes, which prescribe the ideal woman as highly invested in family and the ideal man as highly invested in work, women who experience work interference with family (WIF) and men who experience family interference with work (FIW) would elicit negative reactions. Results of three experimental studies (N Study1 = 569; N Study2 = 299; N Study3 = 275) and a field study (N = 219) provided only limited evidence for this assumption. However, they consistently showed across all four studies that both men and women who experience FIW were systematically judged and treated less favourably compared to employees with WIF, by observers and their supervisors, on several work-related dimensions (agency, dominance, respect, promotability, work performance, reward allocations). However, they were judged to be the better parents. We discuss the implications of our findings for work-family conflict research.

The (Continuous) Nature of Perceived Gender Counter-Stereotype: A Threshold Model of Gender Stereotype Maintenance.

People often expect men and women to look, act, and think like typical members of their gender groups. When men and women deviate from gender-stereotypical expectations across various domains, people tend to denigrate them, compared to those who follow stereotypical expectations. This derogatory attitude-termed the backlash effect-has been well supported by psychological research. However, previous studies on the backlash effect have often neglected the fact that men and women can be counter-stereotypical of their gender groups, to varying degrees. This research tried to address this continuous nature of counter-stereotypical characteristics in various domains using six experiments to evaluate individual responses to gendered facial cues, behaviors, and psychological traits. We conducted three studies, with two experiments per study. Most importantly, this research proposed a threshold model of gender stereotype maintenance to explain people's evaluations of gender-counter-stereotypical targets across various domains. The threshold model suggested that appraisal for a target with balanced gender-stereotypical and gender-counter-stereotypical characteristics tends to be more positive than for a target who strictly adheres to gender stereotypes or gender-counter-stereotypical characteristics. The results of all three studies supported the threshold model, which demonstrated a curvilinear pattern of participants' appraisals and targets' gender-counter-stereotypical degrees. The threshold model of stereotype maintenance has enriched the traditional stereotype maintenance theory and enlightened the development of a more effective impression management strategy. Moreover, it provided more ecological validity that treated gender counter-stereotype as a continuum rather than a binary variable.

The Negation Bias in Stereotype Maintenance: A Replication in Five Languages

Research on linguistic biases shows that stereotypic expectancies are implicitly reflected in language and thereby subtly communicated to message recipients. Research on the Negation Bias shows that the use of negations (e.g., not stupid vs. smart) is more pronounced in descriptions of stereotype-inconsistent compared with stereotype-consistent behaviors. This article reports a replication study of the original research conducted in Dutch, using newly developed materials, and in five different languages: English, Dutch, Hungarian, Finnish, and Serbian. The results validate the existence of the Negation Bias in all five languages. This suggests that negation use serves a similar stereotype-maintaining function across language families.

Conceptual and visual representations of racial categories: Distinguishing subtypes from subgroups

While much of the person perception literature has focused solely on the representation of superordinate social categories (e.g., race and age), these superordinate social categories may be organized into smaller subcategories (i.e., subtypes and subgroups) that can be distinguished by their perceived typicality. Based on the logic that atypical subcategories represent subtypes and typical subcategories represent subgroups, we hypothesized that some subcategory labels would elicit greater perceived stereotypicality compared to others. In Experiment 1, participants listed stereotypic traits and rated the perceived typicality of subcategories of Black and White men. In Experiment 2 we used a reverse correlation image classification procedure to estimate participants' visual representations of the faces of Black and White superordinate category and subcategory members. Results indicated that representations of Black subgroups reflected traits and features more prototypical of Black men compared to representations of Black subtypes. Similarly, representations of White subgroups reflected traits and features more prototypical of White men compared to representations of White subtypes. The current experiments further clarify the nature of subcategory representations as subgroups and subtypes within the superordinate category. Implications for stereotype maintenance and change are considered.

Verbal Representation of Ethnic Stereotypes about the Dutch in English (an Insight into Cross-Cultural Perception via the Language)

The paper presents a brief summary of the multi-level interdisciplinary research on Englishmen’s ethnic stereotypes about the Dutch and the ways they manifest themselves in the English language. Unconventionally, the national stereotype is investigated as a subject of Cognitive Linguistics. As a result, the term “conceptual model” is proposed as an equivalent to “conceptual metaphor”, and two conceptual models verbally represented by the ethnonym “Dutch” and phraseological units with this component are described. A literature review examines if the identified conceptual models are supported in literary discourse, then the usage of the key lexis is analyzed meticulously for the same purpose. The last part of the paper suggests the results of the experiment held to verify if the stereotypical perceptions of the Dutch are maintained by people in contemporary Great Britain. The results indicate that language plays a significant role in stereotype formation and maintenance.

Language Use and Stereotyping: the Role of Approach and Avoidance Motivation Goals

The use of more abstract language to describe expected behaviors as opposed to unexpected behaviors has traditionally been considered a way of stereotype maintenance. This tendency is known as linguistic expectancy bias. Two experiments examined the influence of approach and avoidance motivational orientations on the production of this linguistic expectancy bias. It was predicted that approach strategic orientation is likely to describe expectancy consistent behaviors at a higher level of linguistic abstraction than expectancy inconsistent behaviors. In contrast, avoidance strategic orientation is likely to describe both expectancy consistent behaviors and expectancy inconsistent behaviors at a lower level of linguistic abstraction, thus facilitating the disappearance of linguistic expectancy bias. Two experiments confirmed these expectations, using strategic orientation manipulations based either on communication goals or on motor action, and measuring linguistic abstraction either on forced-choice answer format or on free descriptions. Implications for the generalisation of linguistic expectancy bias are discussed.

What Are They Like? Non-Expert Definitions of Stereotypes and Their Implications for Stereotype Maintenance

The current study explores non-expert definitions of stereotypes to better understand whether these present a consistent view of stereotypes. Nine meta-themes emerged from the thematic analysis conducted: accuracy, behavior, cognition, content, function, rationalization, stereotyper, target, and valence. A natural split in the relative frequency with which these meta-themes were coded demonstrates consistency in participants' view of stereotypes as cognitive, neutral, and functional. Definitions are similar to scholarly definitions and are informative about why stereotypes are maintained despite a societal prescription to avoid them. Results suggest that views about accuracy may play a role in this process. Participants who view stereotypes as accurate, appropriate, and valuable ways to understand target groups may use stereotypes despite the prescription of avoidance and may, thus, maintain stereotypes.

Perspective Taking Undermines Stereotype Maintenance Processes: Evidence from Social Memory, Behavior Explanation, and Information Solicitation

Four experiments examined the effects of perspective taking on processes contributing to stereotype maintenance: biases in social memory, behavior explanations, and information seeking. The first two experiments explored whether perspective taking influences memory and spontaneous explanations for stereotype-relevant behaviors. Relative to participants in an objective-focus condition, perspective takers exhibited better recall of stereotype-inconsistent behaviors (Experiment 1) and spontaneously generated more dispositional explanations for them (Experiment 2). Perspective taking had little effect, however, on memory and explanations for stereotype-consistent behaviors. The final two experiments examined the effects of perspective taking on information seeking. Employing a trait hypothesis-testing paradigm in which interviewers tested whether an interviewee was an extravert (Experiment 3a) or an introvert (Experiment 3b), we found that perspective-taking interviewers solicited more hypothesis-inconsistent...

The negation bias: When negations signal stereotypic expectancies.

Research on linguistic biases shows that stereotypic expectancies are implicitly reflected in language and are thereby subtly communicated to message recipients. We examined whether these findings extend to the use of negations (e.g., not smart instead of stupid). We hypothesized that people use more negations in descriptions of stereotype-inconsistent behavior than in descriptions of stereotype-consistent behavior. In 3 studies, participants either judged the applicability of experimentally controlled person descriptions or spontaneously produced person descriptions themselves. Results provided support for this hypothesis. Moreover, a 4th study demonstrated that negations have communicative consequences. When a target person's behavior was described with negations, message recipients inferred that this behavior was an exception to the rule and that it was more likely caused by situational circumstances than by dispositional factors. These findings indicate that by using negations people implicitly communicate stereotypic expectancies and that negations play a subtle but powerful role in stereotype maintenance.

Reactions to ethnic deviance: The role of backlash in racial stereotype maintenance.

Backlash effects are social and economic penalties for counterstereotypical behavior (Rudman & Phelan, 2008). Five experiments support a model of the role of backlash in racial stereotype maintenance from the standpoint of perceivers and actors (Rudman & Fairchild, 2004). In Experiment 1, perceivers sabotaged Asians and Whites for succeeding in counterstereotypical domains, thereby preventing their future success. In Experiment 2, a White rapper suffered prejudice and economic discrimination, relative to a Black rapper, and prejudice mediated discrimination. Further, actors threatened by backlash for achievement in cross-racial domains responded to success in ways that bolster ethnic stereotypes. For example, Black men and women who feared backlash for academic skill (Experiment 3), and non-Black (Experiment 4) and non-White (Experiment 5) men who experienced backlash for cross-racial achievement, resorted to defensive strategies that preserve racial stereotypes (e.g., refusing to publicize and pursue counterstereotypical talents). Implications for cultural stereotype maintenance are discussed.

Stereotypes in the communication and translation of person impressions

Communications about other people may be shaped by group stereotypes. This study examined how racial stereotypes about academic performance affected communicators’ descriptions of individuals and interpreters’ “decoding” of those descriptions. Participants assigned to a “communicator” role viewed a college transcript of a Black or White student, and communicated their impressions to a peer. These communications were more positive when the target was Black than White. However, yoked “interpreters” back-translated the communications to mean that the Black student had an objectively worse record than the White student, an effect that did not emerge among interpreters blind to the student’s race or among no communication controls. Communicators also mis-remembered the Black student’s record as worse than the White student’s. These effects suggest the use of “shifting standards” to communicate about Blacks and Whites and to decode subjective evaluations, an interactive process that may contribute to stereotype maintenance.

Converting Verbs into Adjectives: Asymmetrical Memory Distortions for Stereotypic and Counterstereotypic Information

This paper investigated the hypotheses that (a) inferences from behaviors to traits would occur more frequently than vice versa, (b) this induction-deduction asymmetry would be facilitated by stereotype congruence but inhibited by incongruence, and (c) the tendency to draw trait inferences from stereotype-congruent but not from stereotype-incongruent behaviors would become more pronounced with increasing levels of Need for Cognitive Closure. Participants read information about a female or male job applicant that was in part relevant to gender, in part gender-neutral. The gender-relevant information was either stereotype-congruent or incongruent. Half of the information was presented as trait-adjectives, half as behavior-descriptive verbs. A recognition task was constructed so that some of the items (traits and behaviors) had actually been seen, some were entirely new, and some were new but had been implied by the information given. All three hypotheses were supported. Implications for intra-individual and interpersonal stereotype maintenance are discussed.

The impact of implicit prejudice about the elderly on the reaction to stereotype confirmation and disconfirmation

Previous research demonstrated that perceivers explicitly condemn ingroup members who use racial stereotypes but that they are implicitly more likely to favor those ingroup members rather than ingroup members who do not use racial stereotypes (Castelli et al., 2001). The present study has two main goals. First, we want to investigate whether the same effects can be detected in the domain of ageism. In particular, we predicted that young adults would implicitly but not explicitly favor a young male who describes an old man in a stereotype-consistent way rather than in a stereotypeinconsistent way. Most importantly, we hypothesized that this tendency is related to participants’ prejudice level as assessed through an implicit measure (IAT, Greenwald et al., 1998), so that high prejudice individuals will implicitly favor stereotypere and derogate ingroup members who use stereotype-inconsistent information. Results provide general support for the hypotheses, and their implications for stereotype maintenance and change are discussed.

Biased Language Use in Stereotype Maintenance: The Role of Encoding and Goals.

In 4 studies, the authors investigated the relative impact of biased encoding of information and communication goals on biased language use. A category label (linguistic expectancy bias, Study 1) or a group label (linguistic intergroup bias, Study 2) was presented either before or after a story that participants were asked to communicate. Biased language use only emerged when participants learned about the group membership of the actor or the category label before hearing the story. However, communication goals had an effect on language use at the retrieval stage, independent of encoding (Studies 3 and 4). Although communication goal effects seemed to overwhelm encoding effects, encoding still influenced language use under externally imposed time pressure (Study 3) and self-imposed time constraints (Study 4). This research reaffirms the importance of both cognitive and communicative processes in stereotype maintenance and highlights the conditions under which they each operate.

Prejudice and Stereotype Maintenance Processes: Attention, Attribution, and Individuation.

Three experiments examined the relationship between prejudice and processing of stereotypic information. Higher levels of prejudice were associated with greater attention to and more thorough encoding of stereotype-inconsistent than stereotype-consistent behaviors but only when processing capacity was plentiful (Experiments 1 and 3). High-prejudice participants attributed consistent behaviors to internal factors and inconsistent behaviors to external forces (Experiment 2). Together, these results suggest that high-prejudice people attend carefully to inconsistent behaviors to explain them away but only if they have sufficient resources to do so. Results also showed that low-prejudice but not high-prejudice participants formed individuated impressions by integrating the implications of the target's behaviors (i.e., individuating). High levels of prejudice appear to be associated with biased encoding and judgment processes that may serve to maintain stereotypes.

The recall of stereotypes: the effects of incidentally activated directed forgetting instructions.

Based on the automotive model (J. A. Bargh, 1990) and the directed forgetting paradigm, the present study investigated whether incidentally activated forget and remember cues can lead to similar effects as explicitly given instructions. To this end, the present paper attempted to replicate the findings of Macrae, Bodenhausen, Milne, and Ford (1997) employing their category primes (child abuser, neutral), study lists (List 1, List 2), and procedure. Using explicit directed forgetting instructions, Experiment 1 showed that the recall of the stereotypically relevant words (List 1) was higher when participants were given a remember than a forget instruction. This effect was found regardless of the prime conditions. Similarly, Experiment 2 showed that participants in the child abuser and neutral prime conditions recalled more stereotypically relevant words (List 1) when they were implicitly cued to remember than to forget these words. Experiment 3 showed that cognitively busy participants in the child-abuser, but not in the neutral prime condition, recalled more to-be-forgotten stereotypical words than nonbusy participants. These results are consistent with Macrae et al. s findings, and show that the effects of directed forgetting instructions are similar regardless of whether they were given explicitly or were activated incidentally. Results are discussed in relation to stereotype maintenance.