Social Psychology 3 - Implicit Social Perception Flashcards
(31 cards)
Are schemas/categories stable or easily influenced?
Stable and resistant to change
Disconfirming evidence is likely to change a stereotype
True or false
False
When is a schema most likely to change?
When it is ceasing to be functional and adaptive.
What are Weber & Crocker’s (1985 - 3 models of schema change?
What is the book-keeping model of schema change?
People fine-tune schema with each piece of discrepant information.
Describe the conversion model for schema change
Schemas resist small changes but can change dramatically in the face of many contradictions.
Describe the subtyping model for schema change
Subcategories develop in response to exceptions. By isolating disconfirming instances, the stereotype remains largely intact.
Which model of schema change has the most empiracle support?
Subtyping Model
Give an example of “subtyping” from the subtyping model of a man who doesn’t conform to a stereotype held about men.
“Hes not a typical man because of his e.g. upbringing, weight, interests, home country”
What did Hewstone, Hopkins and Routh’s (1992) police-schools liaison program show about categories?
Concentrated exposure and contact with officers did little to change students’ stereotypes of police.
The liaison officers were evaluated more positively than regular police and judged as “good police” - they were put into a “subgroup” and were seen as not consistent with police officers more generally.
They were seen as exception to the rule
Why are stereotypes hard to change?
Because once they become entrenched disconfirming evidence is seen as ‘exceptions to the rule’ and won’t necessarily break the stereotype.
What does “implicit social perception” mean
Our social perception is “mindless” meaning that it occurs outside of conscious awareness.
Unintentional, uncontrollable, occurs spontaneously, constitutes a large part of our everyday thinking
The default option (fast option) we use in our social perception uses…
Heuristics and stereotypic expectancies
Were not conscious of our opinions generally, we just accept them
John Bargh states that “mindless stereotypic thinking is _____”
Inevitable
We are…
- ‘cognitive monster of stereotyping’*
- ‘The unbearable being of automaticity’*
According to Wegner and Bargh, what types of information has ‘privileged access to the mind’ and which we are attunted to at an unconscious level (that we care most about). 4 things
- Information about the self
- Attitudes and values that are important to us - define who we are
- Negatively valued social behaviour
- Social category information (stereotypes/social groups)
In category activation, do we only take the relevent part of the category out for use or do we experience more?
The knowledge and content stored in LTM associated with the category is also activated.
What did Neely (1991) find in her semantic priming experiments?
If you prime a category before an experiment, then it activates and makes more acessible words and traits associated with category
e.g. woman: easier to think of words like feminine, soft, maternal, caring.
Dovido, Evans and Tyler (1986) experiment on primary category labels found that….
priming a category (black vs white) was followed by a series of stereotypic vs non-stereotypic personality traits (musical for black, ambitious for white)
When does automatic (implicit) processing occur?
Occurs in the absense of explicit attention being drawn to the primers
What do experimenters need to do to test for automatic (implicit) processing?
What did Devine (1989) find in her experiment regarding prejudice about unconscious cognitive stereotyping?
That both high and low prejudice people had negative stereotypes of African Americans automatically activated in unconscious processing
What did Devine (1989) find regarding low and high prejudice people’s beliefs during conscious processing?
Low prejudice people inhibited the stereotype they held and replaced it with egalitarian beliefs and norms.
High prejudice participants did not inhibit the stereotype because it was consistent with their stereotypes
Are stereotypes and prejudice the same thing? Why / why not?
No
Stereotypes are activated unconsciously in all people
Prejudice is a conscious process
What did Locke, Macleod and Walker (1994) find that contradicted Devine’s unconscious negative stereotyping experiment?
What were their conclusions?
Only high prejudice Ss automatically activated a negative stereotype, low prejudice participants did not.
Conclusions: prejudice levels (attitudes) determined whether or not stereotyping was automatically activated.
