Current stereotypes: A little fading, a little faking.

Abstract

The possibility that social-desirability-tainted responses emerge in the study of stereotypes is suggested and examined. Sixty white American subjects were randomly assigned to one of four experimental conditions. Subjects were asked to indicate how characteristic each of 22 adjective traits was of either "Americans" or "Negroes." This was cross-cut by a measurement variable: Half of the subjects responded in a rating situation in which they were presumably free to distort their responses. Remaining subjects responded under "bogus pipeline" conditions; that is, they were led to believe that the experimenter had an accurate, distortion-free physiological measure of their attitudes, and they were asked to predict that measure. The results supported our expectation that the stereotype ascribed to Negroes would be more favorable under rating than under bogus pipeline conditions. Americans were more favorably stereotyped under bogus pipeline than under rating conditions. A number of explanations for these results are discussed, and consideration is given to the relationship between verbally expressed attitudes and other, overt, behavior.

Social influences on spatial memory

“…Put another way, our method of labeling racial categories without a parallel labeling of spa- their political attitudes than about their racial attitudes (McConahay, 1986;Sears, 1988). When asked about their racial attitudes directly, people often mask their true feelings (Sigall & Page, 1971); the same does not seem to be generally true for political attitudes. Although less reactive, political affiliation is still a social category that fits with spatial contexts.…”

“…Racial relations have a regrettable history of violence and subjugation in the United States. As a result, many people attempt to distance themselves from accusations of racial bias, as is evidenced by the various methods developed to implicitly measure racial bias (e.g., Fazio et al, 1995;Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998;Sigall & Page, 1971). Thus, it is possible that strong affective sensitivity to racial information may have contributed to its influence in our experiments.…”

The Ambivalent Sexism Inventory: Differentiating hostile and benevolent sexism.

“…Prejudice, Allport wrote, "is an antipathy based upon a faulty and inflexible generalization" (p. 9). The existence of prejudice is commonly indexed by measures of antipathy, such as social distance (e.g., Crosby, Bromley, & Saxe, 1980) and negative stereotypes (e.g., Sigall & Page, 1971 ). Relationships between men and women, however, do not easily fit the mold of ethnic prejudice, at the very least because no other two groups have been as intimately connected (S. T. Fiske & Stevens, 1993).…”

Evidence for racial prejudice at the implicit level and its relationship with questionnaire measures.

“…Donnerstein, Donnerstein, Simon, & Ditrichs, 1972;Duncan, 1976;Gaertner & Dovidio, 1977;McConahay, 1983;Sigall & Page, 1971;Word, Zanna, & Cooper, 1974). In these experiments, White participants reliably manifest discriminatory behavior toward African American targets, for example, evaluating African Americans' job qualifications less favorably or being more likely to judge an African American target's behavior as aggressive.…”

“…This position was echoed by others (cf. Dovidio & Fazio, 1992;Dovidio & Gaertner, 1986;McConahay, 1986;Pettigrew & Meertens, 1995;Sigall & Page, 1971), and in explanation, researchers have focused on the potential reactivity of common questionnaire measures. Sensitive to societal norms of nondiscrimination and equality, respondents try to avoid appearing prejudiced and adjust their answers on attitude surveys accordingly.…”