Stereotypes on autopilot
Prejudice and social cognition
Hey all,
Welcome to Human Nature, the illustrated psychology newsletter.
It seems as if no matter how much progress is made on the path towards equality and tolerance, prejudice and discrimination stubbornly persist all across the world. When our news cycles are still dominated by wars, genocides and racist attacks in 2024, it’s understandable that we may feel pessimistic about the future.
However, in order to combat prejudice, we must first understand how it works. In this new series of Human Nature, we will explore the mechanisms behind prejudiced thinking and behaviour through the lens of social psychology. Let’s begin with stereotypes.
Stereotypes on autopilot
What it is: Stereotypes are cognitive structures that contain our beliefs and expectations about a social group.
You have probably heard the following story countless times: a father and a son are in a car accident and get taken to the nearest hospital. When it’s time to perform the surgery, the surgeon refuses, saying, “I can’t operate on him, that’s my son!”. How could this be? As you probably know or guessed, the surgeon is the boy’s mother. However, in 2022, 80% of Americans could not solve this riddle. This is because it’s difficult to control automatically activated stereotypes—in this case, that surgeons tend to be men.
How it was discovered: Stereotypes have probably been around for as long as human social groups have existed, but the discovery that they’re an automatic process is fairly recent. A process is considered automatic if it’s unintentional, effortless, occurs without the person’s awareness and does not interfere with other cognitive processes.
In order to understand whether stereotypes fit this definition, Patricia Devine devised an experiment which tested this hypothesis. Devine (1989) used a priming paradigm to activate a stereotype. Participants were presented with words relating to stereotypes associated with black people just outside of their direct line of vision. One group was presented with a high proportion of stereotype primes (80%), while the other received a low proportion (20%).
Priming refers to how the activation of a construct makes related concepts more accessible. For example, when we are presented with the word ‘horse’, the words ‘mane’, tail’ and ‘saddle’ become more readily available.
Then, in a seemingly unrelated second experiment, participants were given a scenario about someone acting ambiguously hostile and asked to rate the person’s behaviour. Hostility was chosen on the basis that it formed a common feature of the black stereotype. Participants who had been given a high proportion of stereotypical primes were more likely to rate the person in the scenario as hostile than those who had received a low proportion. What’s more, their self-reported prejudice levels had little effect on their ratings, which provided even stronger support to the theory that stereotype activation is automatic and unintentional.
Why it happens: We categorise people and objects into groups based on their common characteristics in order to make it easier to process the world around us. If we didn’t have categories such as animals, trees, buildings, people, etc., it would take tremendous mental effort to process all the information we’re presented with, as everything we encountered would be novel. Therefore, categorisation serves and important role in our cognitive functioning.
We also have schemas, mental representations of the members of each category, which form out expectations about them.
Finally, as you’ll recall from our first series, we rely on heuristics to lessen our mental load. These are mental shortcuts or rules of thumb that allow us to make quick judgements about people or situations. Stereotypes are thought to function as heuristics.
What can we do about it: We now know that although stereotypes occur automatically, there are several factors that can challenge their activation. For example, depending on our goals, individual beliefs about prejudice and equality, and attentional resources, it is possible to prevent stereotype activation.
However, even if a stereotype is activated, it does not have to lead to a stereotypic response. This is because automatic and controlled processes happen independently, therefore automatic stereotypes don’t necessarily affect controlled behaviour.
This was a long one, so well done if you made it to the end. Thank you for reading, see you next time!
Sources:
Category and stereotype activation: Is prejudice inevitable? (Lepore & Brown, 1997).
Stereotypes and Prejudice: Their Automatic and Controlled Components. (Devine, 1989).