Week 4 PSYC12
Lecture 3
Maintenance of stereotypes
- Cognitive
-- Confirmation bias
--- Perceptual
--- Behavioral
- Motivational
Maintenance of stereotypes
Sub-typing
- Don Cherry: he is known for being a nationalist, disliking other nationalities that play hockey. He also
dislikes French Canadian players. When he is pushed on it, he would say that he loves French people. He
would also say that some people are French, but they don't act French.
- Re-fence stereotype - disconfirming individuals
- You can dislike the group but sub-type certain members of the group. "I don't like black people but I
love Michael Jordan"
- Allows for maintenance of stereotypes & prejudice
- The group members that you like are not emblematic of the group
- Allows people to feel non-prejudiced
- Stereotypes allow people to save cognitive resources
Macrae, Milne, & Bodenhausen, 1994 (research)
- Humans have developed cognitive "tools" allowing us to analyze social environment efficiently
- Stereotypes are one of these "tools"
-- They allow us to forego effortful individuation
-- They make useful predictions
-- When taxed (busy, rushed), people use stereotypes
Research content:
- Participants performed two tasks simultaneously
- Task 1 - impression formation
-- Name followed by 10 trait terms
-- Half given a stereotypic label (e.g., doctor, artist, skinhead), half given no label
-- Half of the traits were stereotypic, half neutral
-- Half of the names were given stereotypic label, half weren't. Half were given stereotypic traits,
whereas the other half weren't
- Task 2 - Information Monitoring
-- Participants heard a 2 minute passage on Indonesia
-- DV: Recall of traits with appropriate targets; performance on multiple-choice test on passage
Study results:
Participants remembered traits associated with someone with a label than with someone with no label.
I.e., with the label Skinhead, participants had an easier time remembering traits. People that were given
stereotype label group had an easier time with the MC quiz on Indonesia
The bottom line - stereotypes helps people save cognitive energy to do other stuff
- Stereotypes improved recall
- For stereotypic and neutral items
- Performed better on MC test
Bruner & Goodman, 1947
1 Week 4 PSYC12
- They had children estimate the size of various discs. The children compared discs with coins, and the
results show that disc estimations have low standard deviation, whereas the coins
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