Lecture 3: The Cognitive Approach & Person Perception

Question 1

cognitive approach (4)

Answer 1

• 1980s onwards: Prejudice was explained as a universal process emerging from normal thought processes and cognitive functions.
• A mechanism used to cope with the vast quantity of information we are exposed to every day, need an organizing structure to make sense of this.
  
  • No longer thinking that stereotypes are only bad, but rather tools.
  • It’s simpler to group people and think of all members of a group as being similar in their characteristics—leads to stereotyping but is not a malicious process.

Question 2

schemas (4)

Answer 2

• Cognitive structures that contain a person’s knowledge and beliefs about an object or social group; a pattern of thought or behaviour to organize categories of information
• Schemas influence: 1) what we pay attention to; 2) how we organize information; 3) what we remember later.
• Categories are linked to content, whereby one activates the other (spreading of activation; mutually activates one another).
• Stereotypes are schemas of people or social groups.

Question 3

the continuum model (Fiske & Neuberg, 1990) (1)

Answer 3

Question 4

initial categorization (3)

Answer 4

• Automatically process people’s group membership; immediate, unconscious process.
• Categorize based on obvious membership or traits.
• Primitive categories: age, gender, and race.

Question 5

personal relevance (3)

Answer 5

• Personally relevant to you: allocate more attention, attend to attributes.
• Not personally relevant: stop impression formation and form impression based on initial categorization.
• What determines relevance?
  
  • e.g. It’s late at night and you’re walking home alone, so you might consider people more carefully for your own safety.

Question 6

attend to attributes (3)

Answer 6

• Not personally relevant to you: initial categorization only.
• Personally relevant to you: examine other attributes of the target, which requires cognitive resources.
• Attention doesn’t guarantee accuracy; perceivers may still move forward with category based impressions, but attention is necessary for individuation/trait based impressions.

Question 7

category confirmation (6)

Answer 7

• Attempt to preserve original categorization, i.e. is this initial categorization useful/likely?
• Most of the time, we will be able to confirm. Three instances where we will confirm the categorization:
  
  • 1) Category-consistent attributes;
  • 2) Category + mixed attributes;
  • 3) Category + irrelevant attributes.
• Motivation influences probability of confirming (e.g. self-esteem threat, outcome dependency).

Question 8

re-categorization (5)

Answer 8

• Requires sufficient motivation and attentional resources.
• Re-categorization is only more likely when there’s:
  
  • Strong category-inconsistent information
  • Weak initial category + category/judgment irrelevant attributes.
• More refined impression formation.

Question 9

piecemeal processing (6)

Answer 9

• Happens when previous categories fail.
• Motivation to form accurate impressions.
• Integrate each attribute to form overall impression.
  
  • Initial category becomes one of these attributes.
• Uncommon stage because it’s cognitively taxing; aren’t motivated to process deeply about people we have superficial interactions with.
• However, we would still be able to do piecemeal processing for very stereotyped groups.

Question 10

public expression and further assessment (2)

Answer 10

• The impression formed influences that cognitions, attitudes, and behaviors and willingness to express these.
• At this stage, other factors will influence decision to express attitudes (e.g. social norms, social context).

Question 11

What is one way stereotypes can form? (1)

Answer 11

• illusory correlation: An erroneous inference about the relationship between two categories of events (e.g. associating minority group members and negative behaviours which are both infrequent and thus distinctive).

Question 12

What are some ways stereotypes are maintained? (3)

Answer 12

• Linguistic Bias
• Heuristics:
  
  • Confirmation Bias
  • Attribution Error

Question 13

Hamilton & Gifford (1976) (4)

(hint: illusory correlation)

Answer 13

• Participants saw 26 (18P-8N) behaviours about Group A and 13 (9P-4N) behaviours about Group B, some positive and some negative.
• Participants were asked to recall how many positive and negative behaviours were in each group, and to rate how likeable each group was.
• Participants greatly overestimated the number of negative behaviours in the minority group (Group B) and rated them as less likeable.
• Demonstrates the effects of illusory correlations and how we come to form mental representations of minorities.

Question 14

linguistic category model (9)

Answer 14

• Proposed by Maass et al. (1989).
• Descriptive action verb; e.g. “A is choking B”, very concrete.
• Interpretive action verb; e.g. “A is hurting B”, more abstract.
• State verb; e.g. “A hates B”; even more abstract, getting into affective states; beyond a specific action, these two people have something going on beyond this instance.
• Adjectives; e.g. “A is aggressive”; not talking about the interaction, but just going straight to describing a person with a personality trait.
• Information encoded at higher levels of abstraction:
  
  • Is resistant to disconfirmation;
  • Implies high stability over time (i.e. going beyond one instance);
  • Generalizes across settings and interaction partners;
  • Supposedly reveals more about the person than it does about the situation.

Question 15

Maass et al. (1989), Study 1 (6)

(hint: linguistic intergroup bias)

Answer 15

• Researchers presented 16 cartoons to members from two competing groups in a village during a festival.
• Cartoon characters were either in the ingroup or outgroup (red scarves or blue scarves).
• Looked at cartoon and had to describe whether it’s a desirable or undesirable behaviour.
• Had to choose the best description of the scene, using the four different types of word choices (4 levels of abstraction: 4 being more abstract).
• Participants used more abstract language when describing undesirable behaviours of outgroups and desirable behaviours of ingroups, suggesting that these undesirable behaviours are more diagnostic of their character.
• More concrete language when describing desirable behaviours of outgroups and undesirable behaviours of ingroups, suggesting that these behaviours are circumstantial/exceptions.

Question 16

confirmation bias (1)

Answer 16

• The tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one’s existing beliefs or theories.

Question 17

attribution error (1)

Answer 17

• More likely to attribute other’s (negative) behaviour to internal and stable traits, more likely to attribute your own (negative) behaviour to external circumstances.

Question 18

How do confirmation bias and attribution error contribute lead to the same behaviours being perceived very differently? (2)

Answer 18

• People perceive behaviour consistent with their expectations (confirmation bias).
• People make different causal implications depending on group membership (attribution error).

Question 19

Duncan (1976) (7)

(hint: cartoons; attribution)

Answer 19

• Gave a cartoon to participants that portrayed a black/white actor and black/white victim (four combinations).
• Does the race of the actor and victim affect adjectives people use to describe the scene?
  
  • Black harm doer and white victim = more likely to be described as violent behaviour.
  • White harm doer and black victim = more likely to be described as playing around/dramatizing.
• Participants then asked to make attributions, either person or situation.
  
  • Black harm doer = more likely to make person attributions.
  • White harm doer = more likely to make situational attributions.

Question 20

Macrae, Milne, & Bodenhausen (1994) (14)

(hint: stereotype efficiency)

Answer 20

• Hypothesis: When a label (e.g. skin-head) is given to a person, participants ought to be better at processing stereotype consistent information than when no label is provided.
• Dual-task paradigm: perform two tasks concurrently; measure performance on a second task as an indication of how many cognitive resources free beyond the first task.
• If stereotypic thinking is cognitively efficient, people ought to do better on the second task when stereotypes activated vs. not.
• Study 1: Participants completed a cued recall task for impression formation, then completed 20 MCQs about Indonesia (based on the auditory recording).
  
  • When given stereotype consistent info, participants remembered far more pieces of info when given a label.
  • Participants given a label answered more questions correctly.
  • Suggests that stereotypes are cognitively efficient by freeing up resources.
  • But were perceivers consciously using stereotypes as resource-saving tools or is this an unconscious process?
• Study 2 used subliminal priming in a similar procedure and found weaker results.
• Study 3 corrected some limitations to Study 2: participants may have given each task equal priority, if cognitive resources are intentionally shared between the tasks, the dual-task is no longer a measure of free resource.
  
  • Corrected by using a probe reaction task as a secondary task.
  • Were able to replicate the results of Study 1.
  • Supraliminal primes improve recall for stereotype consistent traits.
  • Supra & subliminal primes improve cognitive efficiency as measured by probe reaction task.

Question 21

How can we use stereotypes to maintain self-esteem? (4)

Answer 21

• Criticism threatens self-esteem, we expend energy to justify ignoring criticism.
• Stereotypes might play a role in justification: Activate stereotypes to justify forming a positive or negative impression.
• Positive feedback, no threat → might inhibit stereotype activation to justify positive impression, validating the feedback.
• Negative feedback is threatening → activating stereotypes that justify a negative impression can justify discounting this feedback.

Question 22

Sinclair & Kunda (1999) (13)

(hint: black doctor; feedback)

Answer 22

• What role does motivation play in stereotype inhibition?
• Study 1: Male participants completed an interpersonal skills questionnaire. Were then given feedback on how they did the questionnaire: either positive or negative. Race of hiring manager: either black or white.
  
  • Then had to do a word fragment completion task, and rated the evaluating manager using a questionnaire.
  • As expected, when people got negative feedback from a black manager, people were much more likely to use stereotypic word completions (e.g. WEL[FARE] vs. WEL[COME]).
  • In contrast, when they heard positive things, people weren’t activating their stereotypes.
  • In participants’ evaluations of the manager, when negative feedback was given by a black manager, people rated their skill as significantly less.
  • Conclusion: When motivated to think highly of a Black manager, people inhibit the Black stereotype. Otherwise, the stereotyped impression formation might have interfered with participant’s ability to form their desired impression of him.
• Study 3: Replicated Study 1 with male and female participants. Feedback manipulation: positive vs. negative (control with no feedback); race of doctor: black vs. white.
  
  • Then completed a lexical decision task with neutral, doctor-related, or Black-related words.
  • Participants are far slower to respond to black-related words when given positive feedback by a black doctor (inhibition), and far faster when given negative feedback by a black doctor (activation).
  • Participants were much faster to respond to doctor-related words when given positive feedback by a black doctors (activation), and far slower when given negative feedback from black doctors (inhibition).
  • There was no significant difference for either condition with white doctors.
• Implications: We selectively activate and inhibit categories. Motivation to protect our self-esteem can be one determinant of what identity is activated. Thus, our resultant impression formation based on group membership is flexible based on what categories we’re activating or inhibiting.