The trouble of thinking: Activation and application of stereotypic beliefs.

Gilbert, Daniel T.; Hixon, J. Gregory

doi:10.1037/0022-3514.60.4.509

Cited by 1,062 publications

(1,019 citation statements)

References 48 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

941

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…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: 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

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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, ...

show abstract

mentioning

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

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Individuals use stereotypes in judgments to a greater extent when processing resources are scarce or time pressure is high (e.g., Gilbert & Hixon, 1991;Macrae, Milne, & Bodenhausen, 1994). In contrast, when individuals are motivated to respond without prejudice and they have sufficient cognitive resources, they try to control the influence of stereotypes on judgments (e.g., Neuberg & Fiske, 1987).…”

Section: Stereotype Activation and Stereotype Applicationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The extent to which stereotypes are activated depends on a number of factors, such as the prototypicality of the group member (Blair, Judd, Sadler, & Jenkins, 2002;Freeman & Ambady, 2009) and the learning history of the perceiver (Gawronski, Deutsch, Mbirkou, Seibt, & Strack, 2008;Weisbuch, Pauker, & Ambady, 2009). Stereotype activation can be described as a partially automatic process in the sense that it can happen relatively quickly (e.g., Dovidio, Evans, & Tyler, 1986) and outside of awareness (e.g., Wittenbrink, Judd, & Park, 1997), while at the same time it depends on processing goals (e.g., Macrae, Bodenhausen, Milne, Thorn, & Castelli, 1997) as well as processing resources (e.g., Gilbert & Hixon, 1991).…”

Section: Stereotype Activation and Stereotype Applicationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Since the early days of research on impression formation and stereotyping, researchers have made a distinction between stereotype activation and application (e.g., Brewer, 1988;Devine, 1989;Fiske & Neuberg, 1990;Gilbert & Hixon, 1991;Hamilton, 1981). Stereotype activation is an increased accessibility of knowledge about social groups.…”

Section: Stereotype Activation and Stereotype Applicationmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Disentangling stereotype activation and stereotype application in the stereotype misperception task.

Krieglmeyer¹,

Sherman²

2012

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

155

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

When forming impressions about other people, stereotypes about the individual's social group often influence the resulting impression. At least 2 distinguishable processes underlie stereotypic impression formation: stereotype activation and stereotype application. Most previous research has used implicit measures to assess stereotype activation and explicit measures to assess stereotype application, which has several disadvantages. The authors propose a measure of stereotypic impression formation, the stereotype misperception task (SMT), together with a multinomial model that quantitatively disentangles the contributions of stereotype activation and application to responses in the SMT. The validity of the SMT and of the multinomial model was confirmed in 5 studies. The authors hope to advance research on stereotyping by providing a measurement tool that separates multiple processes underlying impression formation.

show abstract

“…To date, most of the work concerned with this distinction has focused on demonstrating that stereotypic knowledge in general, and racial stereotypes in particular, may in fact be activated effortlessly and influence subsequent judgments unbeknownst to the perceiver (Banaji & Greenwald, 1995;Banaji, Hardin, & Rothman, 1993;Devine, 1989;Fazio, Sanbonmatsu, Powell, & Kardes, 1986;Gaertner & McLaughlin, 1983; D. T. Gilbert & Hixon, 1991;Macrae, Stangor, & Milne, 1994;Perdue & Gurtman, 1990). Much less work exists that directly assesses the relationship between implicit and explicit measures of stereotyping and prejudice.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Wittenbrink¹,

Judd²,

Park³

1997

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

633

672

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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,

show abstract

The trouble of thinking: Activation and application of stereotypic beliefs.

Cited by 1,062 publications

References 48 publications

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

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

Disentangling stereotype activation and stereotype application in the stereotype misperception task.

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

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About