Five alternative information processing models that relate memory for evidence to judgments based on the evidence are identified in the current social cognition literature: independent processing, availability, biased retrieval, biased encoding, and incongruity-biased encoding. A distinction between two types of judgment tasks, memory-based versus on-line, is introduced and is related to the five process models. In memory-based tasks where the availability model describes subjects' thinking, direct correlations between memory and judgment measures are obtained. In on-line tasks where any of the remaining four process models may apply, prediction of the memory-judgment relationship is equivocal but usually follows the independence model prediction of zero correlation. This research was supported by funds from the Trout Foundation. Nancy Pennington provided extensive and valuable advice at all stages of this research. Ebbe B. Ebbesen, David L. Hamilton, G. Daniel Lassiter, and Thomas M. Ostrom made helpful comments on the research plan and on the manuscript.

Using a simple videogame, the effect of ethnicity on shoot/don't shoot decisions was examined. African American or White targets, holding guns or other objects, appeared in complex backgrounds. Participants were told to "shoot" armed targets and to "not shoot" unarmed targets. In Study 1, White participants made the correct decision to shoot an armed target more quickly if the target was African American than if he was White, but decided to "not shoot" an unarmed target more quickly if he was White. Study 2 used a shorter time window, forcing this effect into error rates. Study 3 replicated Study 1's effects and showed that the magnitude of bias varied with perceptions of the cultural stereotype and with levels of contact, but not with personal racial prejudice. Study 4 revealed equivalent levels of bias among both African American and White participants in a community sample. Implications and potential underlying mechanisms are discussed.

The content of spontaneously activated racial stereotypes among White Americans and the relation of this to more explicit measures of stereotyping and prejudice were investigated. Using a semantic priming paradigm, a prime was presented outside of conscious awareness (BLACK or WHITE), followed by a target stimulus requiring a word-nonword decision. The target stimuli included attributes that varied in valence and stereotypicality for Whites and African Americans. Results showed reliable stereotyping and prejudice effects: Black primes resulted in substantially stronger facilitation to negative than positive stereotypic attributes, whereas White primes facilitated positive more than negative stereotypic traits. The magnitude of this implicit prejudice effect correlated reliably with participants' scores on explicit racial attitude measures, indicating that people's spontaneous stereotypic associations are consistent with their more controlled responses.Over the past 40 years, opinion surveys have documented substantial changes in racial attitudes among White Americans (Campbell,

In 3 experiments, White American college students received a message advocating either a color-blind or a multicultural ideological approach to improving interethnic relations and then made judgments about various ethnic groups and individuals. Relative to a color-blind perspective, the multicultural perspective led to sU'onger stereotypes, greater accuracy in these stereotypes, and greater use of category information in judgments of individuals. This increase in between-category differentiation occurrexi both for attributes that favored the in-group and for attributes that favored the out-group and was also paired in some cases with greater overall positivity toward the out-group. The findings lead us to question the implicit assumption driving the majority of social psychological efforts at prejudice reduction: that the categorization process leads to prejudice, and that the relevance of social categories must therefore be de-emphasized. The historical idea of a unifying American identity is now in peril .... Instead of a transformative nation with an identity all its own, America in this new light is seen as preservative of diverse alien identifies .... The multiethnic dogma abandons historical purpose, replacing assimilation by fragmentation, integration by separatism. It belittles unum and glorifies pluribus .... One wonders: Will the center hold? Or will the melting pot give way to the Tower of Babel. (Schlesinger, 1992, pp. 16-18) Ethnic lines will not disappear in the foreseeable future. In many parts of the world strong forces are drawing those lines more sharply. Ethnic groups in conflict mutually reinforce their antagonistic identifies. In the midst of collapsing states and empires, old dreams of their own nation-state become vivid for many long-suffering ethnic minorities. In less conflictual settings, the continuing need for a more personal identity in a culturally complex and rapidly changing world persists .... At this period in history, it is not a matter of assimilation versus ethnicity, but of assimilation and ethnicity.

Police officers were compared with community members in terms of the speed and accuracy with which they made simulated decisions to shoot (or not shoot) Black and White targets. Both samples exhibited robust racial bias in response speed. Officers outperformed community members on a number of measures, including overall speed and accuracy. Moreover, although community respondents set the decision criterion lower for Black targets than for White targets (indicating bias), police officers did not. The authors suggest that training may not affect the speed with which stereotype-incongruent targets are processed but that it does affect the ultimate decision (particularly the placement of the decision criterion). Findings from a study in which a college sample received training support this conclusion.

Four experiments were conducted to explore the hypothesis that in-group members perceive their own group as more variegated and complex than do out-group members (the out-group homogeneity principle). The first three experiments were designed to demonstrate this effect in a symmetric manner for both parties of the in-group-out-group dichotomy, and the fourth experiment tested one particular theoretical account of this phenomenon. In Experiments 1 and 2, men and women subjects estimated the proportion of men or women who would endorse a variety of personality/attitude items. The items were constructed to vary on the dimensions of stereotypic meaning (masculinity-femininity) and social desirability (favorable-unfavorable). It was predicted and found that outgroup members viewed a group as endorsing more stereotypic and fewer counterstereotypic items than, did in-group members. These findings were interpreted as support for the out-group homogeneity principle, and it was argued that since this effect was general across items varying in social desirability, the phenomenon was independent of traditional ethnocentrism effects. Experiment 3 asked members of three campus sororities to directly judge the degree of intragroup similarity for their own group and two other groups. Again, each group judged its own members to be more dissimilar to one another than did out-group judges. In Experiment 4 a theory was proposed suggesting that different "levels of social categorization" are used to encode in-group and out-group members' behavior and that this process could account for the perception of out-group homogeneity. It was predicted and found that men and women were more likely to remember the subordinate attributes of an in-group member than of an out-group member, which provides some evidence for the theoretical model.

The goal of the research reported in this article was to examine whether automatic group attitudes and stereotypes, commonly thought to be fixed responses to a social category cue, are sensitive to changes in the situational context. Two experiments demonstrated such variability of automatic responses due to changes in the stimulus context. In Study 1 White participants' implicit attitudes toward Blacks varied as a result of exposure to either a positive (a family barbecue) or a negative (a gang incident) stereotypic situation. Study 2 demonstrated similar context effects under clearly automatic processing conditions. Here, the use of different background pictures (church interior vs. street corner) for Black and White face primes affected participants' racial attitudes as measured by a sequential priming task. Implications for the concept of automaticity in social cognition are discussed.

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