Affective influences on stereotype judgements

Abstract

What role does affect play in stereotype judgements? This experiment investigated mood effects on perceptions of Asian (heterosterotype) or Causcasian (autostereotype) characters who were part of a same-race or a mixed-race dyad. We expected that mood should (a) distort stereotype judgements in a mood-consistent direction, and (b) that mood biases should be stronger for mixed-race dyads that require more detailed and inferential processing. Happy, neutral or sad mood was induced in subjects (n=198) using an audio-visual mood induction procedure in an allegedly separate experiment. Subjects were then asked to form impressions of Asian or Caucasian targets associated with a same-race or an other-race partner. As predicted, we found consistent mood-congruent biases in such judgements. However, both positive and negative mood effects were significantly greater when a target was part of a mixed-race dyad, a condition presumably requiring more detailed and substantive inferential processing. These findings are interpreted in terms of current affect-cognition theories, and the implications of the results for everyday affective influences on stereotype judgements are considered.

Acquisition and Development of a Shared Psychological Intergroup Repertoire in a Context of an Intractable Conflict

“…Indeed, studies with children demonstrate that the infl uence of affect does not decline with age, positive and negative moods, or threatdetermined attitudes towards out-groups Ramsey, 1987 ). The same results were reported for adults (Bar-Tal, 2001 ;Esses, Haddock, & Zanna, 1994 ;Forgas & Moylan, 1991 ;Jackson, Hodge, Gerard, Ingram, Ervin, & Sheppard, 1996 ;Lake & Rothchild, 1998;Stephan & Stephan, 2000 ;Tropp & Pettigrew, 2004 ). These fi ndings suggest that through the lifespan, emotions play an important role in initiating, maintaining, or changing interpersonal and intergroup responses.…”

When Do People Rely on Affective and Cognitive Feelings in Judgment? A Review

“…This is presumably because people are less familiar with negative health events than with positive health events, making judgments of the former relatively more malleable. Relatedly, Forgas and Moylan (1991) observed that incidental affective states had a stronger influence on evaluations of a partner of another race than on evaluations of a partner of the same race. This is presumably because compared to samerace individuals, other-race individuals are more atypical and less familiar, making their evaluation more malleable.…”

Arousal and evaluative extremity in social judgments: A dynamic complexity model

“…impression formation (e.g. Forgas and Moylan, 1991, Niedenthal and Showers, 1991, Schwarz and Clore, 1983. For example, stimulus complexity has been found to influence the use of heuristics in encoding social judgments (Branscombe and Cohen, 1991).…”