prejudice

Being “prejudiced” without knowing it: Stereotyping at the automatic level We previously discussed studies by Correll, Payne and others, demonstrating

that White participants were more likely to shoot an unarmed African American target person than they were to shoot an unarmed White person. Most of the participants in these studies believe that they are unbiased and harbor no prejudices toward African Americans or toward other minorities. Their judgments and behavior however, indicate that they may be biased. Are the participants lying to the researchers or are they perhaps lying to themselves?

Consider the following: African American participants in these studies show the same racial bias noted above toward Black targets as White participants do. That is, they too are more likely to shoot an unarmed Black person than an unarmed White person. Is it possible that awareness of the stereotype associating African Americans with violence is sufficient to produce this bias, even if the individual does not believe the stereotype is true?

Stereotypes can be automatic and unconscious Patricia Devine was the first researcher to suggest that merely knowing the

content of stereotypes is enough to have them influence our behavior. It’s almost impossible not to learn the content of some stereotypes because our culture is saturated with them. By merely watching television we may see images of African Americans and Latinos as criminals or women as sex objects. The consequence is that cultural stereotypes become overlearned so they may spontaneously and unintentionally pop into our minds when we encounter members of stereotyped groups even if we don’t personally believe the stereotype is true.

The problem is that people who are low in prejudice and people who are high in prejudice are equally susceptible to the automatic activation and use of stereotypes because they are equally knowledgeable about them.

Some evidence for this view comes from studies using social neuroscience. Researchers use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine what happens in the brain when participants are exposed to pictures of people from different groups. These studies have focused on the amygdala. The amygdala serves as a low-level threat detector that is activated in response to potentially

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dangerous stimuli. It is associated with arousal, heightened awareness, uncertainty and emotional intensity and it operates at an automatic and unconscious level of processing. When White participants view Black rather than White faces, there is greater activation in the amygdala. However, this occurs if the faces are presented for a short period of time (30 milliseconds). If the faces are shown for a longer time (525 milliseconds), the difference in amygdala response to Black and White faces is significantly reduced. In this longer exposure condition, we see greater activation of the frontal cortex, a brain region associated with control and regulation, for Black faces vs. White faces. This suggests that participants are trying to control their possibly biased thoughts and feelings. This control is not possible however, with limited time.

This idea ties in to what Devine calls Controlled processing. People can stop the automatic stereotype activation process. But if they are busy, overwhelmed or distracted, they may not initiate that controlled level of processing and may in fact, treat a person stereotypically. Stereotypes in effect, are our default option so, sadly, they can affect us in spite of our good intentions.

The fact that controlled processing takes time can also be seen in the weapons identification/shoot studies. When participants were given more time to respond, the bias quickly disappeared.

Stereotype activation can be triggered automatically and unconsciously, influencing our subsequent thoughts, feelings and behaviors. It is clear though that several factors such as available time, can disrupt the activation process or make it less likely to happen. What are some of these other factors?

Prejudice level – Stereotypes can be activated even among those low in

prejudice but the threshold for what triggers a stereotype may be lower for those relatively high in prejudice. Because they are more likely to believe in stereotypes (verified by research) they may develop associations that are more highly accessible – that is, easy to bring to mind. Because people low in prejudice engage in less stereotyping in general, they may develop weaker associations that are less accessible.

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Prototypicality – refers to how much a person is typical of his or her group. Stereotypes are more likely to be activated when the person is more representative of the group. For example, the prototypical European American has light-colored skin, light or dark eyes, straight or loosely curled hair that can either be light or dark in color, relatively narrow nose and relatively thin lips. The prototypical African Americans has dark brown skin, dark eyes, tightly curled dark hair, a relatively broad nose and relatively full lips. Cues other than appearance can also influence prototypicality, such as a person’s ethnic name, style of clothing etc.

White research participants rate a more prototypical African American in more stereotypical terms. That is, they are more likely to evaluate his ambiguous behavior in line with stereotypes about aggression than if the stimulus person is less prototypically African (i.e., lighter skin color). (see article “Looking deathworthy.”).

Situational Salience: The effect of being a solo – Imagine that you are the only

person of your kind in a group of people. For example, you are the only woman in a group of men, or the only man in a group of women. You could be the youngest person in a group of elderly people or the oldest person in a group of young people. You get the point.

What is the effect of being salient in a setting? If you are salient, you stick out in some way and capture people’s attention. Consider the diagram below:

X X X X X X X X X X X O X X X Notice that your eyes tend to be drawn toward the O and not any individual

X. A similar process occurs in social situations: people’s attention tends to be drawn to the unusual or unique person rather than to members of the majority group. People who are minorities in situations like these (e.g., the only woman, man, young or old person, Latino, White person, etc.) indicate that they feel uncomfortable because they think they are being scrutinized and observed excessively. The research indicates that their perceptions are accurate.

What difference does such environmental salience make? One effect is that it makes people think of stereotypes associated with group that is in the minority.

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A White person in a group comprised only of Whites, for example, might not think much about his or her racial identity. The presence of a Latino however, brings race to the forefront. Similarly, adding a woman to an all- male work group can raise awareness of gender issues.

In addition to thinking of stereotypes, solo status also results in majority group members seeing the solo in stereotypical ways. The solo’s characteristics are distorted so that he or she fits the expected stereotype. A group of men, for example, will notice when a solo woman behaves in a way that confirms stereotypes about women. However, the same men will tend not to notice when the woman’s behavior does not conform to gender stereotypes. The same woman in a mixed sex group would be less likely to be seen stereotypically.

Imagine a committee meeting. The group is composed of six men and one woman. The chairperson wants someone to take notes about the meeting’s proceedings. In mixed sex group, he may or may not ask a woman to record the minutes of the meeting (a stereotypically female task). He is much more likely however, to turn to the solo woman in a mostly male group and ask her to record the minutes. Imagine another scenario. An object in a work environment needs to be examined because it is broken. In a mixed sex group, a man or a woman may be asked to look at the object. If a man however, works in a mostly female group, it’s likely that the job will fall to him since this is a stereotypically masculine task.

Because more attention is directed to people when they are solos, behavior has more impact. In the salient context, even seemingly minor issues, such as what a person wears to a business meeting, will have a larger impact. The result is that evaluations of people are more extreme when they are solos. If you perform well, your evaluation is likely to be more positive than if your performance had taken place in a mixed group. If you perform poorly, your evaluation is likely to be more negative than it had occurred in a mixed group.

The research on solo status, in addition to other research, tells us that diversity is best for intergroup relations.

Cognitive Resources – some people are more likely than others to have the

cognitive resources available to inhibit stereotyping. One factor is age. Older

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people have a harder time suppressing stereotypes than younger people, which may explain in part why older people appear more prejudiced than younger people. Being intoxicated makes even younger people have a difficult time suppressing thoughts or inhibiting impulses so it’s not surprising that being drunk impairs people’s ability to control stereotypes.

Feeling strong emotion can sap the cognitive resources needed to avoid stereotyping. Perhaps this is why ethnic, racial and other slurs are flung at people in angry confrontations. Being tired also makes stereotype use more likely. In an interesting demonstration of this, Bodenhausen classified participants by their circadian or biological rhythms, into two types: morning people (people who describe themselves as most alert early in the morning) and night people (people who say they are alert much later in the evening). Participants then took part in an experiment in human judgment that was scheduled at either 9 A.M. or 8 P.M. The result? Morning people were more likely to use stereotypes when tested at night when they were tired and night owls were more likely to do so early in the morning when they were more likely to be tired. These studies suggests that when we are not at the top of our game because we are tired, angry or emotional, we don’t have the mental strength to prevent ourselves from using stereotypes that may be just lurking under the surface.

Motivational Factors – Whether we realize it or not, we often have particular

goals in mind when we encounter others. For example, we might want to learn about them, we might want to impress them, or we might not want to be bothered by them. Some goals make us more likely to activate stereotypes and other goals have the opposite effect.

One important goal is the desire to maintain, protect or enhance or self- image and self-esteem. This goal can lead even people who are low in prejudice to activate negative stereotypes. For example, when their self-esteem is threatened, people may be motivated to stereotype others so that they will feel better about themselves. Negative stereotypes can help to achieve this goal because seeing others in a negative light can make us look better by comparison.

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Consider the following study. Participants were given a test that supposedly measured their social and verbal skills. Some of the participants were told that they did well on the test and some were told that they had done very poorly (this feedback was given randomly. That is, what they were told was not related to their actual performance on the test). The participants then took part in what was supposedly a second study. Their task in the second study was to evaluate a job applicant. They received a picture of a young woman, her resume and they saw a clip of her job interview. Half of the participants were given information that suggested that the woman was Jewish, while the other half were led to believe that she was not Jewish.

The results revealed that those participants whose self-esteem had been temporarily lowered by the fake test results rated the woman more negatively if they thought she was Jewish, than did the participants whose self-esteem had been lowered but did not think she was Jewish. The results also indicated that the more negatively they evaluated her, the better they later felt about themselves. These results suggest we may be more likely to use negative stereotypes when judging a person from a different group after experiencing a temporary blow to our self-image.

A study by Sinclair and Kunda directly measured the activation of stereotypes in a situation where self-esteem was threatened. White participants were interviewed by a Black or White manager and were then given either a positive or negative performance evaluation by the manager. The participants later rated the manager’s skill and competence and they were also asked questions about their emotional state after the interview. The participants then took part in what they believed to be a second unrelated study. In this “second” study, they were asked to work on incomplete word fragments. For example, the participant was given fragments such as _ _ CE, _ _ ACK, CR_ _ _, _ AP, CO_ _ _, DR_ _ _ . It was the participant’s job to fill in the blanks in order to make words.

An automatic stereotype is assumed to be activated if participants fill in many blank words related to a stereotype. A nice benefit to this method is that participants are unlikely to be aware of what the experimenter is assessing. In the present study, investigators were assessing if the participants would complete the words above in ways that reflected they were thinking about African

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Americans (e.g., Race (vs. rice, face, nice), Black (vs. flack, slack, wrack, Crime (vs. cramp, crone, crisp) Rap (vs. zap, map, lap), Drug (vs. drool, drips, drums).

The results indicated that receiving positive feedback from a Black manager led participants to inhibit stereotypes about Black people. In other words, these participants were less likely to fill in word fragments with stereotyped words. In fact, these participants were less likely to fill in the word fragments stereotypically than were participants who had received positive feedback from a White manager. It seems that they were trying very hard not think of the manager in stereotypical terms.

On the other hand, those participants who had received negative feedback from the Black manager activated the stereotype; thus, they filled in the words stereotypically. Being able to call to mind a stereotype that would make the evaluator look less competent (that is, the negative Black stereotype) seemed to lessen the effect of the negative feedback and so helped the participants maintain a positive self-image. These participants also indicated that the negative feedback did not make them feel badly. In fact, their mood was identical to the mood of those participants who had received positive feedback from the White evaluator. They were able to shrug off bad news from a Black manager. Interestingly though, those participants who received a negative evaluation from a White manager did feel badly about their performance. Receiving a bad evaluation from a Black man just did not matter. Similar results have been found for stereotypes of Asians, gay men and women.

Taking this issue further, Sinclair and Kunda conducted a study in which participants received either positive or negative feedback from a Black physician. This study used a different method in order to determine if participants were thinking along stereotypical lines.

After receiving their feedback, participants sat in front of a computer screen and had to make a judgment about whether words appearing on the screen were actual words. A “word” would appear, for example “leems” and the participant would press one key on the keyboard to indicate if it was an actual word and a different key to indicate if it was a nonsense word. The investigators recorded how quickly these decisions were made.

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As in their other study, some of the words used were related to stereotypes about Black people. Other words were related to physicians (e.g., scalpel, bandage, needle, etc.) and some words were neutral (not related to Black people or to doctors). The reasoning here is that if a stereotype is activated in a person’s mind, he or she should recognize a stereotype related word more quickly than if he or she is not thinking of the stereotyped group. The results showed that when the physician provided negative feedback, the Black stereotype was activated and the positive physician stereotype was inhibited; that is, participants tended to think of their evaluator as Black rather than as a physician since they recognized the “Black” words more quickly as words than they recognized the “physician” words as words. Seeing him mainly as a Black man diminished the value of his criticism and helped to discredit him. Doing so, preserved the participants’ self-esteem. When the feedback was positive though, the physician stereotype was activated and the Black stereotype was inhibited; that is, they tended to think of him as a physician rather than as a Black man. Thinking of him in terms of the positive physician stereotype enhanced the value of his praise and benefitted their self-image.

Stereotypes then, can be activated or inhibited as our self-esteem needs require.

Motivation to be a fair person – Although we may have unconscious

motivations to stereotype others, clearly many people are motivated not to stereotype or discriminate against others. People who are internally motivated not to be prejudiced (as opposed to people who are externally motivated; they don’t want to appear prejudiced to others) are likely to be more successful at controlling stereotyping, but even they are vulnerable to the strong power of automatic stereotyping.

You may wonder: What if I just try really hard to not think about a stereotype? Research suggests that sometimes the harder you try to suppress an unwanted thought, the less likely you are to succeed. Try not to think about a white bear, and that image may pop into your mind despite your best intentions. Try not to think about eating chocolate cheesecake – get the idea?

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So trying not to think about a person stereotypically can cause the stereotype to pop up even more, like a volleyball that’s been held under water. BUT, research suggests that when people are really motivated to suppress a stereotype that they truly don’t believe in, they may be successful in avoiding it. People who care deeply about not being prejudiced can become more successful at suppressing stereotypes. Such people often realize that they have failed to live up to that goal and they feel guilty about that. Over time they develop expertise at recognizing the situations and stimuli that tend to trigger these failures and therefore they can exert more control over them. In so doing, they learn how to interrupt what had been automatic stereotype activation.

Rather than attempting to suppress stereotypes though, it might be better to actively bringing to mind examples of people who do not behave stereotypically. Research indicates that this may help us to avoid seeing an individual in terms of the relevant stereotypes. So for example, if I meet someone whose group is stereotyped as aggressive, if I consciously bring to mind people from this group who do not behave this way, I may be able to avoid applying my expectations in this specific encounter.