What is stereotype activation and accuracy? - Chapter 4

How can stereotypes lead to a negative outcome for a person, say being rejected for a job because of one’s gender? The first thing needed is stereotype knowledge. Everybody needs to have knowledge about these stereotypes, even non-prejudiced people. This does not mean that a person agrees with these stereotypes. Stereotype endorsement is the extent to which a person agrees with the stereotypes. The second step that leads to negative outcomes of a stereotype is stereotype activation. Usually stereotypes are dormant until they get activated. The last step is stereotype application. This means that the activated stereotype is applied to a person. This process is automatic.

What is stereotype activation?

When a stereotype is activated it is capable to influence people’s thoughts. When categories have been made two types of stereotype activation processes begin that can influence each other and operate at the same time. The first one is the automatic process, this is triggered by observing stimuli that are associated with the stereotyped group. The second one is motivated processing. These get activated when stereotypes can help fulfill certain goals and needs. These motives can arise from individual difference factors or from situational factors. Also, the aspects of stereotypes must be relevant to the situation in which people find themselves. If you’re looking for an employee, stereotypes of work-related traits (like lazy or hard working) will be activated.

What is automatic activation?

When stereotypes are activated by showing the stimuli only briefly there is a greater activation in the amygdala, a brain area associated with emotions, when participants see black faces rather than white faces. If stimuli are presented longer the frontal cortex gets activated, which is associated with regulation and control. The activation was greater for black faces than for white faces. This suggests that participants are trying to control their biased responding.

When automatic processing occurs it is because of cultural environments. Culture establishes links between categories and stereotypes. When these links are strong in the culture people learn the links well and the stereotype becomes a conditioned mental response to the category. Category activation leads to stereotyping.

How does prototypicality and situational context influence activation of stereotypes?

There are some factors that influence the activation of a stereotype. One of those factors is prototypicality. White people rate Black people who have more prototypically African face features as more negative than when a black person is less prototypical. Another factor is context. When you encounter somebody, it will occur in a certain context, like in a store or a theatre. This can affect a person’s interpretation about you. Stereotypes have positive and negative components. The place you encounter somebody can influence which component of the stereotype will be activated. If you meet somebody in a dark alley, a negative stereotype will probably be activated. If you meet somebody at a daycare, a positive stereotype will probably be activated. Researcher has found that viewing black people in a positive context (like a family barbecue) brings more positive association to the Black people than viewing black people in a negative context (urban street with graffiti on the wall). Why is this? Researchers have found that categorization and stereotype activation occur at the subtype level (like black priest) rather than at the category level (like black person).

What is the influence of prejudice?

Another factor is prejudice. Prejudice can facilitate stereotype activation. People high in prejudice have a higher tendency to attribute stereotypic traits to certain groups than people low in prejudice. This occurs because automatic stereotype activation occurs because of the well-learned associations between a category and the stereotypes associated to this. Because high prejudiced people use stereotypes more consistently they develop associations that are highly accessible. For low prejudiced people the opposite is true.

What is the influence of cognitive busyness?

The last factor that will be discussed is cognitive busyness. Stereotypes need to be retrieved from long-term memory before they can be used and brought into working memory. But if this working memory is already in use there might not be enough space left in working memory for stereotypic information. So stereotypes won’t usually be activated if the person is cognitively busy.

What is motivated activation?

People’s motivation has an influence on stereotype activation. People want to achieve their goals and if they can achieve that by stereotype activation, they do that. If stereotypes stand between them and their goals, stereotype activation will be inhibited. Five different goals will be discussed.

What is the comprehension goal?

The first goal is the comprehension goal. People want to understand why certain things happen and they want to know what other people are like. Knowing these things makes the world more predictable and people feel more secure. You will know how a person will react, know the causes of certain events and you will know how to respond effectively.

What is the self-enhancement goal?

The second goal is self-enhancement. People want to see themselves in a positive light. One way in which this can be achieved is by stereotypes. If you see someone in a negative light, you will feel better about yourself. In one research, white participants received either positive or negative feedback on the test results. They either received this from a black or a white person.

Negative stereotypes of the black interviewer were activated when he gave the person negative feedback. People tried to lessen the effect of the negative feedback by making the evaluator look less competent. They did this by activating a negative black stereotype. But not only are negative stereotypes activated. When the evaluator was black and gave positive feedback, negative stereotypes were inhibited. The man wasn’t seen as a black man, but as a researcher. So his positive praise was worth something to the participants, because he was not ‘just a black guy’, he was a researcher and when a researcher praises you, your self-esteem goes up.

What is social adjustment?

The third goal is social adjustment. People want to fit situations and follow the rules and behaviour of a certain setting. You speak in a different way to your parents about a subject than to your friends. This can also affect stereotypes. When people talk to black interviewers, they may be less willing to admit their racial prejudices than when they talk to white interviewers. This is because the social norm of not offending others is so strong that it inhibits stereotype activation.

Why do you need motivation to control prejudice?

The fourth goal is motivation to control prejudice. Prejudice is considered as a negative trait and people try to avoid acting in this way. People don’t want to act in this way because it’s against their values or because they don’t want others to think of them as prejudiced. This can help inhibit stereotype activation.

What is stereotype relevance?

The last goal is stereotype relevance. People will activate stereotypes if it helps them fulfill a need. It they interact with a person of a stereotyped group, a stereotype will only be activated if it helps to fulfill the needs of the people.

As discussed before, cognitive busyness can inhibit stereotype activation. But if a motive is strong enough it can overcome the automatic inhibition process. So there can be multiple motives in play and the effects of these can reinforce or work against each other.

What is the role of categorization?

A person must be categorized as a member of a stereotyped group. When this has happened the stereotype can be activated. People can be categorized in more than one group and several processes work to determine which category gets the most attention. The first thing you notice about another person is race. This is followed by gender. There is a fraction of a second difference in this shift in attention. People will use both categories to classify somebody. This results in subcategories, like white woman. This substereotype will be available for activation.

There are some factors that affect the speed of categorization. One of those factors is prototypicality. A person is prototypical if he or she fits the observer’s concept of the features of that category. The more prototypical people are of a category, the more quickly they can be categorized. This is called the racial phenotypic bias. Prototypicality is not just defined by the physical features, but also a person’s likeability. White people categorize admired members of their own race more quickly than disliked members. Black people, however, were categorized more quickly when they were disliked than when they were admired. 

Categorization is an automatic process, but it can be influenced by situational factors. These factors can have an impact on the categorization process. They can make you choose one category over another. People subcategorize using basic social categories, but they need to be motivated to subcategorize on the basis of other characteristics. When someone meets a nurse the salient category will be white woman, not nurse, because gender and race are the basic social categories. People use basic categories rather than subcategories.

The context can also influence categorization. When one person differs from his/her group members in a way observers pay the most attention to the category in which the person differs from the group members. When one black woman is seen in an all-male context, observers think of her as a women, they thought of her in terms of her gender. When that woman was seen in an all-white context, they thought of her in terms of her race. People’s action might also draw attention to a category.

When observers saw an Asian woman putting on make-up they thought of her in terms of her gender. When they saw her eating with chopsticks, they thought of her in terms of her race. Observers use the basic social category their attention has been drawn to.

People who are racially prejudiced pay more attention to race than other characteristics. This affects categorization and these people are also biased in the categorizations they make. Sometimes people also use ingroup overexclusion. They don’t want to treat outgroup members as though they are part of the ingroup. It is thus safer to misclassify ingroup members as outgroup members than to misclassify outgroup members as ingroup members.

Exclusion of outgroup members can also be accomplished by accurate classification. This can be difficult, because there are light-skinned African Americans and dark-skinned European Americans. Prejudiced people may be very motivated in that case to accurately classify people as Black or White. It takes racial prejudiced people in that case longer to categorize racially ambiguous faces. Prototypical faces were categorized immediately.

What is stereotype application?

When a stereotype is activated it is available to be used. But a stereotype can also be inhibited. To inhibit a stereotype one must be motivated. But being motivated is not everything. A person might be motivated and can control his/her verbal behaviour, but he/she might not be able to control nonverbal behaviour (like making eye contact). So unless a person wants and can inhibit a stereotype, stereotype application will probably occur.

What motivation do you have to inhibit stereotyping?

A couple of factors can influence the motivation to inhibit stereotypes. Some factors are similar to the factors we discussed before.

• Motivation to control prejudice. People usually don’t want to act in a prejudiced manner. They might feel bad about themselves if they view others in stereotypic terms.
• Comprehension goals. People want to be accurate about their beliefs about other people. When you know what other people are like, you know how to interact effectively with them. If you don’t know how other people are, you might be concerned you might do or say something to offend the person. While judging others, people prefer to use individuation information. They look at the information that is specific to the person. However, this does not always do away with the influence of stereotypes.
• Cognitive style. Cognitive styles are individual differences in people’s motivation to acquire and use information. This can affect the use of stereotypes. People who have a high need for cognition want to consider all the options when making a decision. People who are low on this treat, only think about things carefully if they have a reason to do so. People who are low in need for cognition, use stereotypes more often to make judgments than people high in need for cognition. Another cognition style is causal uncertainty. Some people have a need to understand how the world and other people operate. They want to gather a lot of information to understand the world. These people are high on causal certainty. People who are low on this trait, are sure that they understand the world correctly and usually use stereotypes. A third type of cognitive style is need for closure. People who are high on this trait, prefer simple answers to questions and they prefer to use stereotypes.
• Self-enhancement goals. Treats to self-esteem will facilitate the application of stereotypes. When you see someone in a negative stereotype, you will feel better of yourself.
• Social power. Having powers over others facilitates the application of stereotypes of the people subject to that power. People who have a lot of power usually have a job where they’re entitled to judge others. Because of this, they sometimes get overconfident about their judgments about others. This leads to stereotypes. Also, powerful people want to keep the difference in power between them and others and they do this by stereotypes. Powerful people might also stereotype subordinates because they have no motivation to individuate them. There is also a difference in stereotype inhibition between different leaders. Some power holders are weakness-oriented and other are strength-oriented. The first want to avoid failure and see subordinates in stereotypic terms when those stereotypes indicate that the subordinates might not have the capability to do a task. The subordinate is not allowed to work on the task. The second type leader wants to achieve success and view subordinates in stereotypic terms when these stereotypes indicate that the subordinates do have the capability to bring this task to a good end.

When do you have the ability to inhibit stereotyping?

In this chapter a couple of ways for inhibiting stereotypes have been discussed. However, sometimes this is not possible. These factors will be discussed next.

In the previous part of this chapter, I discussed how cognitive busyness could prevent the activation of stereotypes. But when a stereotype has been activated and is in working memory, cognitive busyness can use up mental resources that could otherwise be used for the search of individuating information. Because of this stereotype inhibition will be prevented and stereotypes will be applicated.

Another factor that could prevent stereotype inhibition is the time of day. Morning people are most active in the early part of the day and evening people are more active in the evening. By active, cognitive capacity is meant. Stereotypes are often used in the non-active period. So for morning people this would be in the evening and for the evening people this would be in the morning.

When cognitive load is high people pay more attention to stereotypic information once a stereotype is activated. They don’t individuate information. This is because it’s easier to integrate stereotype-consistent information when the working memory is limited.

What are the consequences of stereotype use?

Sometimes some behaviours are judged negatively when a member of a minority group does it and judged positively when somebody from the own group does it. When a white person shoves another person, people might think he’s just fooling around. When a black person shoves another person, one might say that he’s aggressive. This is consistent with the stereotype that black people are aggressive. The same thing occurs for social class. When behaviour is ambiguous it is often judged more positively when it involves rich people than when it involves poor people.

Stereotypes can have an impact on evaluation. Some members of minority groups will be evaluated more negatively for certain behaviour than white people. Sometimes it also depends on which category you look at. When participants had to evaluate whether an Asian woman was qualified as a computer technician, it depended on the category they paid attention to whether she would be seen as qualified or not. When the participants saw her as an Asian (Asian stereotype is positive for this job), they found her more qualified than when they saw her as a woman (negative stereotype for this job).

What is the role of stereotype maintenance and change?

Special things are seen on the news. You would think that when someone from a certain group does something special which doesn’t fit the stereotypes of that group and it’s on the news, it’s good because people can see that not every person of that group is the same. But in fact, standing out is not good for people who belong to a certain group. This is because this person is seen in more exaggerated stereotypic terms than usual. Perceivers will keep their stereotypic beliefs.

Stereotype-inconsistent information surprises people. This is because they want to account for the stereotypic information. When somebody has to pay attention to a certain person he or she will most likely remember information that is consistent with his/her stereotypic expectations. Stereotypic expectations affect both what people remember about someone and how they used that remembered information in later judgements. This can influence memory. When you see two people and one of them does something and you will probably think it was the person who’s stereotype fits the action best. This is called source confusion. Assimilation could also happen. This means that a general behaviour is assimilated to fit the stereotype.

Some people are entity theorists. That means that they believe that personality is fixed and that situational factors don’t influence someone’s personality. Incremental theorists believe that a person’s behaviour is influenced by the situation. When people get new information entity theorists focus on stereotype-consistent information and incremental theorists focus on both stereotype-consistent and stereotype-inconsistent information. When incremental theorists show preference, it is for stereotype-inconsistent information. This of course has an impact on stereotype maintenance. Because entity theorists don’t pay attention to stereotype-inconsistent information they are less likely to change their stereotypic beliefs. Because incremental theorists consider both stereotype-consistent and stereotype-inconsistent information they are more likely to change their stereotypic beliefs.

On a side note: people remember information better when they have strong expectancies, when they are engaged in a complex judgement and when they have to remember specific information rather than form an overall impression.

What is the self-fulfilling prophecy?

People’s stereotypes influence their social behaviour in social interactions. When I behave towards somebody that leads him to behave in a way that I expected because of the stereotypic belief I have about him, a self-fulfilling prophecy has occurred. If you think that somebody might be a-social you will try to avoid eye contact when you talk to him and keep your distance. This person is maybe not at all aggressive, but because you act so distant towards him/her, he or she might just do the same. This is called behaviour reciprocation.

What are the models of stereotype change?

Fixing incorrect beliefs is a good thing to do. The whole point of having beliefs in the first place is to process information efficiently. How can we do that if we have wrong information? When people see something or someone that doesn’t fit the stereotypical belief, they can change their belief or find a way to put this ‘odd’ information in the category it is part of.

There are a couple of models that suggest how people can change stereotypical beliefs. One is the bookkeeping model. This suggests that people add and subtract information and that this can slowly change beliefs. The conversion model suggests that people change their beliefs if they see contradictory evidence. The subtyping model suggests that contradictory evidence does not affect the beliefs about a group and that a special category to this group is created for this exception. This is called re-fencing. When you see a lot of these ‘exceptions’, they won’t be exceptions anymore. You will then probably change the entire stereotypic belief. People, however, look for reasons not to challenge their stereotypic beliefs. 

'Women' have a stereotype that they are unathletic, so when you meet a very athletic women, she is one of the few you have met, disconfirming the stereotype and being an exception to the rule. This is called concentrated disconfirmation. If you start to notice that there are more women you meet that are very athletic, subtyping researchers label this as dispersed disconfirmation. 

What is the function of stereotypes?

Stereotypes can serve as an ego-defensive function by protecting an individual's self-concept against internal and external threats. Also, people can protect their self-concepts by projecting their negative feelings on to members of other groups. 

Stereotypes can also serve a social adjustment function. All social groups we as individuals are a part of have different norms and expectations and sometimes they provide a direction on how to think and feel about others. 

What are the five D's of difference?

The Ds of difference are:

1. Distancing: refers to avoiding situations in which we feel out of place
2. Denial: can make it difficult to accept research findings suggesting a bias against another group, but denying it's existence. 
3. Defensiveness: refers to people's desire to guard against the possibility to be biased, seen as unfair or uncaring.
4. Devaluing: happens when we describe someone from a different culture as 'exotic'.
5. Discovery: is about appreciating the differences between oneself and another and seeing how enriching those differences can be.