The authors argue that self-image maintenance processes play an important role in stereotyping and prejudice. Three studies demonstrated that when individuals evaluated a member of a stereotyped group, they were less likely to evaluate that person negatively if their self-images had been bolstered through a self-affirmation procedure, and they were more likely to evaluate that person stereotypically if their self-images had been threatened by negative feedback.' Moreover, among those individuals whose self-image had been threatened, derogating a stereotyped target mediated an increase in their self-esteem. The authors suggest that stereotyping and prejudice may be a common means to maintain one's self-image, and they discuss the role of self-image-maintenance processes in the context of motivational, sociocultural, and cognitive approaches to stereotyping and prejudice. A most striking testament to the social nature of the human psyche is the extent to which the self-concept-that which is the very essence of one's individuality-is integrally linked with interpersonal dynamics. Since the earliest days of the formal discipline of psychology, the significant influences of a number of social factors on the self-concept have been recognized. A central focus of sociocultural and social-cognitive approaches to psychology has concerned the ways in which individuals' self-concepts are defined and refined by the people around them. This is evident in early discussions of the social nature of individuals' self-concepts (Cooley, 1902; Mead, 1934) and of social comparison theory (Festinger, 1954), and it continues to be evident in more recent work, such as that concerning self-fulfilling prophecies (e.g.,
This research examined why suspicion of ulterior motives leads perceivers to avoid the correspondence bias in the assigned-essay paradigm, in contrast to information about situational constraint. Five experiments offer converging evidence that suspicion triggers active, sophisticated attributional thinking. These studies examined participants' spontaneous thoughts and attributional analyses in the context of high-constraint or ulterior-motives conditions. The studies (a) suggest that high-constraint information and ulterior-motive information have divergent effects on perceivers early in the inference process, (b) demonstrate the correspondence bias in instances in which demand characteristics arc minimized, and (c) show that the effects of suspicion can endure across targets and contexts. The implications of these results for current models of the correspondence bias and the dispositional inference process, and suggestions for a revised model, are discussed.Suspicion is a unique aspect of social perception. Perceivers are aware that the targets of their social perceptions occasionally behave in ways that are meant to deceive them. Although perceivers may be fooled by nonsocial objects, they are not likely to suspect that these objects intended to behave in a particular manner to convey fictitious or misleading information. Our curses to the contrary, most of us realize that our computers do not intentionally crash whenever they sense that we are under unusually great amounts of pressure. Relative to the processes involved in object perception, perceivers who wish to understand and predict the behaviors of social beings must engage in much more sophisticated attributional analyses. An outcome of this need is the. psychological state of suspicion.The studies reported in this article examined how suspicion affects the dispositional inferences that perceivers draw from another individual's behavior. One of the most fundamental points of social psychology is that such inferences tend to fail to take into sufficient account the situation in which the behavior occurred. The voluminous and oft-cited literature concerning the fundamental attribution error, or correspondence bias, speaks to this point. In sharp contrast to this robust bias, however, there is some evidence to suggest that when perceivers learn information that provides them with reason to suspect the motives of the actor, they tend to draw inferences that do not reflect this bias. Jones, Davis, and Gergen (1961), for example, found that participants who had reason to suspect that a job candidate may have been influenced by ulterior motives when responding to questions about his personality tended to discount the candidate's statements and refused to draw correspondent inferences (see also Reeder & Brewer, 1979; Reeder, Messick, & Van Aver-I would like to thank
Does self-image threatening feedback make perceivers more likely to activate stereotypes when confronted by members of a minority group? Participants in Study 1 saw an Asian American or European American woman for several minutes, and participants in Studies 2 and 3 were exposed to drawings of an African American or European American male face for fractions of a second. These experiments found no evidence of automatic stereotype activation when perceivers were cognitively busy and when they had not received negative feedback. When perceivers had received negative feedback, however, evidence of stereotype activation emerged even when perceivers were cognitively busy. The theoretical implications of these results for stereotype activation and the relationship of motivation, affect, and cognition are discussed.
Three studies examined the hypothesis that when perceivers learn of the existence of multiple, plausibly rival motives for an actor's behavior, they are less likely to fall prey to the correspondence bias than when they learn of the existence of situational factors that may have constrained the actor's behavior. In the first 2 studies, Ss who learned that an actor was instructed to behave as he did drew inferences that corresponded to his behavior. In contrast, Ss who were led to suspect that an actor's behavior may have been motivated by a desire to ingratiate (Study 1), or by a desire to avoid an unwanted job (Study 2), resisted the correspondence bias. The 3rd study demonstrated that these differences were not due to a general unwillingness on the part of suspicious perceivers to make dispositional inferences. The implications that these results have for understanding attribution theory are discussed.
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