Automatic Activation of Stereotypes: The Role of Self-Image Threat

Spencer, Steven J.; Fein, Steven; Wolfe, Connie; Fong, Christina T.; Duinn, Meghan A.

doi:10.1177/01461672982411001

Cited by 217 publications

(194 citation statements)

References 36 publications

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“…A series of studies have demonstrated that threats to the self either via reminder of mortality (Burke, Martens, & Faucher, 2010;Maj & Kossowska, 2015) or through negative feedback about oneself (Allen & Sherman, 2011;Fein & Spencer, 1997;Spencer, Fein, Wolfe, Fong, & Duinn, 1998) can lead participants to increase their reliance on negative stereotypes about others. Allen and Sherman demonstrated that this effect was due to a greater focus on the negative attributes of out-groups, suggesting that Soc Just Res (2017) 30:323-354 331 these effects do represent a means of self-protection through the devaluation of nonself groups.…”

Section: Prejudice and The Conceptual Selfmentioning

confidence: 99%

Putting Ourselves in Another’s Skin: Using the Plasticity of Self-Perception to Enhance Empathy and Decrease Prejudice

Farmer

Maister

2017

Soc Just Res

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The self is one the most important concepts in social cognition and plays a crucial role in determining questions such as which social groups we view ourselves as belonging to and how we relate to others. In the past decade, the self has also become an important topic within cognitive neuroscience with an explosion in the number of studies seeking to understand how different aspects of the self are represented within the brain. In this paper, we first outline the recent research on the neurocognitive basis of the self and highlight a key distinction between two forms of self-representation. The first is the ''bodily'' self, which is thought to be the basis of subjective experience and is grounded in the processing of sensorimotor signals. The second is the ''conceptual'' self, which develops through our interactions of other and is formed of a rich network of associative and semantic information. We then investigate how both the bodily and conceptual self are related to social cognition with an emphasis on how self-representations are involved in the processing and creation of prejudice. We then highlight new research demonstrating that the bodily and conceptual self are both malleable and that this malleability can be harnessed in order to achieve a reduction in social prejudice. In particular, we will outline strong evidence that modulating people's perceptions of the bodily self can lead to changes in attitudes at the conceptual level. We will highlight a series of studies demonstrating that social attitudes towards various social out-groups (e.g. racial groups) can lead to a reduction in prejudice towards that group. Finally, we seek to place these findings in a broader social context by considering how innovations in virtual reality technology can allow experiences of taking on another's identity are likely to become both more commonplace and more convincing in the future and the various opportunities and risks associated with using such technology to reduce prejudice.

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Section: Prejudice and The Conceptual Selfmentioning

confidence: 99%

Putting Ourselves in Another’s Skin: Using the Plasticity of Self-Perception to Enhance Empathy and Decrease Prejudice

Farmer

Maister

2017

Soc Just Res

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“…Other studies have also shown that nonconsciously operating goals are able to overcome obstacles in their path to attainment (Bargh et al, 2001, Studies 3 and 4;Spencer, Fein, Wolfe, Fong, & Dunn, 1998). The Spencer et al (1998) finding is especially dramatic in that it showed that self-protective motives (to derogate minority group members in order to enhance one's own self-esteem) are able to overcome conditions of attentional shortage (i.e., memory load) that previous research had shown sufficient to prevent such stereotyping from occurring (Gilbert & Hixon, 1991).…”

mentioning

confidence: 93%

“…The Spencer et al (1998) finding is especially dramatic in that it showed that self-protective motives (to derogate minority group members in order to enhance one's own self-esteem) are able to overcome conditions of attentional shortage (i.e., memory load) that previous research had shown sufficient to prevent such stereotyping from occurring (Gilbert & Hixon, 1991).…”

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confidence: 96%

What have we been priming all these years? On the development, mechanisms, and ecology of nonconscious social behavior

Bargh

2006

Eur. J. Soc. Psychol.

633

491

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Priming or nonconscious activation of social knowledge structures has produced a plethora of rather amazing findings over the past 25 years: priming a single social concept such as aggressive can have multiple effects across a wide array of psychological systems, such as perception, motivation, behavior, and evaluation. But we may have reached childhood's end, so to speak, and need now to move on to research questions such as how these multiple effects of single primes occur (the generation problem); next, how these multiple simultaneous priming influences in the environment get distilled into nonconscious social action that has to happen serially, in real time (the reduction problem). It is suggested that models of complex conceptual structures (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), language use in real-life conversational settings (Clark, 1996), and speech production (Dell, 1986) might hold the key for solving these two important 'second-generation' research problems.Priming effects are ubiquitous in the social psychological literature these days. Nearly all forms of social representation can be primed, it seems-activated incidentally or unobtrusively in one context, to influence what comes next without the person's awareness of this influence. The original research focused on how the passive activation of trait categories in one situational context carried over to influence social judgments in subsequent, ostensibly unrelated contexts (Higgins, Rholes, & Jones, 1977;Srull & Wyer, 1979). For example, exposing experimental participants to words related to 'kindness' as part of a purported 'language study' caused them to subsequently view a target person as more kind, compared to the impressions formed of the target by a control group (Srull & Wyer, 1979). These priming effects were understood as single concepts or categories 'capturing" the behavioral input in a competition with other, input-relevant concepts, with this categorization or construal of the input serving as the basis for subsequent, consciously-made judgments.The past 25 years have seen amazing empirical advances in our knowledge of the kinds of psychological concepts and processes that can be primed or put into motion nonconsciously. Social norms (Aarts & Dijksterhuis, 2003;Hertel & Kerr, 2001) to guide or channel behavior within the situation; goals to achieve high performance, to cooperate with an opponent, or to be fair minded and egalitarian (Bargh, Gollwitzer, Lee-Chai, Barndollar, & Troetschel, 2001;Moskowitz, Gollwitzer, Wasel, & Schaal, 1999); emotions that shape our reactions and responses to subsequent, unrelated stimuli (Lerner, Small, & Loewenstein, 2004); and of course, knowledge structures such as stereotypes and trait constructs for use in the comprehension and encoding of often ambiguous social behavior (see Bargh, 1989;Higgins, 1996, for reviews). And social behavior itself can be produced nonconsciously in the same fashion (Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996;Chartrand & Bargh, 1999;Dijksterhuis & van Knippenberg, 1998 Still more recently, ...

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“…The general lesson from research in impression formation is that categorical-based impressions are relatively effortless and occur under conditions of low motivation or ability, and individuation is effortful and occurs under conditions of high motivation or ability (Brewer, 1988;Devine & Monteith;1999;Fazio, 1990;Fiske, Lin, & Neuberg, 1999;Fiske & Neuberg, 1990;Kunda & Thagard, 1996; but see Gilbert & Hixon, 1991;Spencer, Fein, Wolfe, Hodgson, & Dunn, 1998). Most models of impression formation assume that stereotypes and other group level information are activated from memory on perception of a group member (e.g., Banaji & Hardin, 1996;Banaji, Harden, & Rothman, 1993;Brewer, 1988;Devine, 1989;Fiske et al, 1999).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Gilbert and Hixon (1991) showed that under conditions of cognitive load, stereotypes may not be activated at all (see also Spencer et al, 1998). Stereotype activation also depends on the goals of the perceiver (e.g., Macrae, Bodenhausen, Milne, Thorn, & Castelli, 1997 In the realm of racial prejudice, other models of avoiding prejudiced responses suggest that motivated individuals might "replace," or "override" prejudiced responses with more positive ones, instead of attempting to correct for the bias associated with their automatically activated attitudes (e.g., Devine & Monteith, 1999;Wilson, Lindsey, & Schooler, 2000).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Trait Inferences as a Function of Automatically-Activated Racial Attitudes and Motivation to Control Prejudiced Reactions

Olson¹,

Fázio²

1999

PsycEXTRA Dataset

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This study investigated how automatically activated racial attitudes and motivation to control prejudiced reactions contribute to the impressions formed of targets whose photos varied by race, gender, and occupation. In earlier sessions, participants completed Dunton and Fazio's (1997) Motivation to Control Prejudiced Reactions scale, and underwent a priming procedure (Fazio, Jackson, Dunton, & Williams, 1995) that provided an unobtrusive estimate of their automatically activated racial attitudes. In the final session, participants provided trait ratings of a number of target photos. Automatically activated racial attitudes were related to the trait inferences participants made of Blacks compared to matched Whites. However, this effect was moderated by motivation to control prejudiced reactions. Among the more motivated, both those with more negative and those with more positive attitudes displayed evidence of correction for their attitudes. This discussion focuses on the ways in which different kinds of motivation to control prejudiced reactions may manifest differently.First impressions are often formed as a function of the category of which the social target is a member. The general lesson from research in impression formation is that categorical-based impressions are relatively effortless and occur under conditions of low motivation or ability, and individuation is effortful and occurs under conditions of high motivation or ability (Brewer, 1988;Devine & Monteith;1999;Fazio, 1990;Fiske, Lin, & Neuberg, 1999;Fiske & Neuberg, 1990;Kunda & Thagard, 1996; but see Gilbert & Hixon, 1991;Spencer, Fein, Wolfe, Hodgson, & Dunn, 1998). Most models of impression formation assume that stereotypes and other group level information are activated from memory on perception of a group member (e.g., Banaji & Hardin, 1996;Banaji, Harden, & Rothman, 1993;Brewer, 1988;Devine, 1989;Fiske et al., 1999). 1 More deliberate and careful processing, on the other hand, can occur as the target's power over the perceiver increases (Fiske et al., 1999), under expectations of future interaction with the target (Johnston, Hewstone, Pendry, & Frankish, 1994), increased accountability for one's judgments (Tetlock, 1992), fear of invalidity (Kruglanski, 1989), and with the presence of unexpected, difficult, or surprising information that begs an explanation (Kintsch, 1988;Kunda, 1990).However, there are some notable qualifications to automatic stereotype activation. Gilbert and Hixon (1991) showed that under conditions of cognitive load, stereotypes may not be activated at all (see also Spencer et al., 1998). Stereotype activation also depends on the goals of the perceiver (e.g., Macrae, Bodenhausen, Milne, Thorn, & Castelli, 1997 In the realm of racial prejudice, other models of avoiding prejudiced responses suggest that motivated individuals might "replace," or "override" prejudiced responses with more positive ones, instead of attempting to correct for the bias associated with their automatically activated attitudes (e.g., Devine & Monteith,...

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Automatic Activation of Stereotypes: The Role of Self-Image Threat

Cited by 217 publications

References 36 publications

Putting Ourselves in Another’s Skin: Using the Plasticity of Self-Perception to Enhance Empathy and Decrease Prejudice

Putting Ourselves in Another’s Skin: Using the Plasticity of Self-Perception to Enhance Empathy and Decrease Prejudice

What have we been priming all these years? On the development, mechanisms, and ecology of nonconscious social behavior

Trait Inferences as a Function of Automatically-Activated Racial Attitudes and Motivation to Control Prejudiced Reactions

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