Social Psychology 3 - Implicit Social Perception

Question 1

Are schemas/categories stable or easily influenced?

Answer 1

Stable and resistant to change

Question 2

Disconfirming evidence is likely to change a stereotype

True or false

Answer 2

False

Question 3

When is a schema most likely to change?

Answer 3

When it is ceasing to be functional and adaptive.

Question 4

What are Weber & Crocker’s (1985 - 3 models of schema change?

Answer 4

Question 5

What is the book-keeping model of schema change?

Answer 5

People fine-tune schema with each piece of discrepant information.

Question 6

Describe the conversion model for schema change

Answer 6

Schemas resist small changes but can change dramatically in the face of many contradictions.

Question 7

Describe the subtyping model for schema change

Answer 7

Subcategories develop in response to exceptions. By isolating disconfirming instances, the stereotype remains largely intact.

Question 8

Which model of schema change has the most empiracle support?

Answer 8

Subtyping Model

Question 9

Give an example of “subtyping” from the subtyping model of a man who doesn’t conform to a stereotype held about men.

Answer 9

“Hes not a typical man because of his e.g. upbringing, weight, interests, home country”

Question 10

What did Hewstone, Hopkins and Routh’s (1992) police-schools liaison program show about categories?

Answer 10

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

Question 11

Why are stereotypes hard to change?

Answer 11

Because once they become entrenched disconfirming evidence is seen as ‘exceptions to the rule’ and won’t necessarily break the stereotype.

Question 12

What does “implicit social perception” mean

Answer 12

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

Question 13

The default option (fast option) we use in our social perception uses…

Answer 13

Heuristics and stereotypic expectancies

Were not conscious of our opinions generally, we just accept them

Question 14

John Bargh states that “mindless stereotypic thinking is _____”

Answer 14

Inevitable

We are…

• ‘cognitive monster of stereotyping’*
• ‘The unbearable being of automaticity’*

Question 15

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

Answer 15

1. Information about the self
2. Attitudes and values that are important to us - define who we are
3. Negatively valued social behaviour
4. Social category information (stereotypes/social groups)

Question 16

In category activation, do we only take the relevent part of the category out for use or do we experience more?

Answer 16

The knowledge and content stored in LTM associated with the category is also activated.

Question 17

What did Neely (1991) find in her semantic priming experiments?

Answer 17

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.

Question 18

Dovido, Evans and Tyler (1986) experiment on primary category labels found that….

Answer 18

priming a category (black vs white) was followed by a series of stereotypic vs non-stereotypic personality traits (musical for black, ambitious for white)

Question 19

When does automatic (implicit) processing occur?

Answer 19

Occurs in the absense of explicit attention being drawn to the primers

Question 20

What do experimenters need to do to test for automatic (implicit) processing?

Answer 20

Question 21

What did Devine (1989) find in her experiment regarding prejudice about unconscious cognitive stereotyping?

Answer 21

That both high and low prejudice people had negative stereotypes of African Americans automatically activated in unconscious processing

Question 22

What did Devine (1989) find regarding low and high prejudice people’s beliefs during conscious processing?

Answer 22

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

Question 23

Are stereotypes and prejudice the same thing? Why / why not?

Answer 23

No

Stereotypes are activated unconsciously in all people

Prejudice is a conscious process

Question 24

What did Locke, Macleod and Walker (1994) find that contradicted Devine’s unconscious negative stereotyping experiment?

What were their conclusions?

Answer 24

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.

Question 25

What does Locke, Macleod and Walker’s studies suggest about high prejudice and low prejudice people regarding their automatic and controlled levels of processing?

Answer 25

That high and low prejudice people are distinguishable at both the automatic and controlled levels of processing.

Question 26

Can people inhibit stereotypes if they are aware of the stereotypic primes? (Blair and Banaji, 1996)

Answer 26

Yes

If you introduce motivational goals (please try to limit stereotyping) they can at the unconscious level)

Question 27

How did Bargh, Chen and Burrows (1996) show the behavioural effects of category priming?

Answer 27

Participants who were given words containing elderly stereotypes walked more slowly down the hall when compared to those who didn’t.

Question 28

What is meant by the behavioural effects of category priming?

Answer 28

That by priming someone with a category it can influence how they act afterwards.

e.g. those presented with elderly words would walk slower afterwards than those who weren’t.

Question 29

Bargh concludes that we are all subject to implicit stereotyping in eveyday life.

What is the insidious consequence of implicit stereoptyping?

Answer 29

Automatic behavioural confirmation effect

Question 30

What is the automatic behavioural confirmation effect?

Answer 30

Your unconscious biases will influence your behaviour, which will then lead you to act in certain ways which will reinforce the behaviour.

e.g. black guy comes up to you at night, you get scared, he sees this and gets defensive “why are you treating me like this?!”, negative response reinforces your behaviour

Question 31

What are 3 criticisms of automaticity research

Answer 31