Lecture 3: The Cognitive Approach & Person Perception Flashcards Preview

🚫 PSY322H1F: Intergroup Relations with A. Chasteen > Lecture 3: The Cognitive Approach & Person Perception > Flashcards

Flashcards in Lecture 3: The Cognitive Approach & Person Perception Deck (22)
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1
Q

cognitive approach (4)

A
  • 1980s onwards: Prejudice was explained as a universal process emerging from normal thought processes and cognitive functions.
  • A mechanism used to cope with the vast quantity of information we are exposed to every day, need an organizing structure to make sense of this.
    • No longer thinking that stereotypes are only bad, but rather tools.
    • It’s simpler to group people and think of all members of a group as being similar in their characteristics—leads to stereotyping but is not a malicious process.
2
Q

schemas (4)

A
  • Cognitive structures that contain a person’s knowledge and beliefs about an object or social group; a pattern of thought or behaviour to organize categories of information
  • Schemas influence: 1) what we pay attention to; 2) how we organize information; 3) what we remember later.
  • Categories are linked to content, whereby one activates the other (spreading of activation; mutually activates one another).
  • Stereotypes are schemas of people or social groups.
3
Q

the continuum model (Fiske & Neuberg, 1990) (1)

A
4
Q

initial categorization (3)

A
  • Automatically process people’s group membership; immediate, unconscious process.
  • Categorize based on obvious membership or traits.
  • Primitive categories: age, gender, and race.
5
Q

personal relevance (3)

A
  • Personally relevant to you: allocate more attention, attend to attributes.
  • Not personally relevant: stop impression formation and form impression based on initial categorization.
  • What determines relevance?
    • e.g. It’s late at night and you’re walking home alone, so you might consider people more carefully for your own safety.
6
Q

attend to attributes (3)

A
  • Not personally relevant to you: initial categorization only.
  • Personally relevant to you: examine other attributes of the target, which requires cognitive resources.
  • Attention doesn’t guarantee accuracy; perceivers may still move forward with category based impressions, but attention is necessary for individuation/trait based impressions.
7
Q

category confirmation (6)

A
  • Attempt to preserve original categorization, i.e. is this initial categorization useful/likely?
  • Most of the time, we will be able to confirm. Three instances where we will confirm the categorization:
    • 1) Category-consistent attributes;
    • 2) Category + mixed attributes;
    • 3) Category + irrelevant attributes.
  • Motivation influences probability of confirming (e.g. self-esteem threat, outcome dependency).
8
Q

re-categorization (5)

A
  • Requires sufficient motivation and attentional resources.
  • Re-categorization is only more likely when there’s:
    • Strong category-inconsistent information
    • Weak initial category + category/judgment irrelevant attributes.
  • More refined impression formation.
9
Q

piecemeal processing (6)

A
  • Happens when previous categories fail.
  • Motivation to form accurate impressions.
  • Integrate each attribute to form overall impression.
    • Initial category becomes one of these attributes.
  • Uncommon stage because it’s cognitively taxing; aren’t motivated to process deeply about people we have superficial interactions with.
  • However, we would still be able to do piecemeal processing for very stereotyped groups.
10
Q

public expression and further assessment (2)

A
  • The impression formed influences that cognitions, attitudes, and behaviors and willingness to express these.
  • At this stage, other factors will influence decision to express attitudes (e.g. social norms, social context).
11
Q

What is one way stereotypes can form? (1)

A
  • illusory correlation: An erroneous inference about the relationship between two categories of events (e.g. associating minority group members and negative behaviours which are both infrequent and thus distinctive).
12
Q

What are some ways stereotypes are maintained? (3)

A
  • Linguistic Bias
  • Heuristics:
    • Confirmation Bias
    • Attribution Error
13
Q

Hamilton & Gifford (1976) (4)

(hint: illusory correlation)

A
  • Participants saw 26 (18P-8N) behaviours about Group A and 13 (9P-4N) behaviours about Group B, some positive and some negative.
  • Participants were asked to recall how many positive and negative behaviours were in each group, and to rate how likeable each group was.
  • Participants greatly overestimated the number of negative behaviours in the minority group (Group B) and rated them as less likeable.
  • Demonstrates the effects of illusory correlations and how we come to form mental representations of minorities.
14
Q

linguistic category model (9)

A
  • Proposed by Maass et al. (1989).
  • Descriptive action verb; e.g. “A is choking B”, very concrete.
  • Interpretive action verb; e.g. “A is hurting B”, more abstract.
  • State verb; e.g. “A hates B”; even more abstract, getting into affective states; beyond a specific action, these two people have something going on beyond this instance.
  • Adjectives; e.g. “A is aggressive”; not talking about the interaction, but just going straight to describing a person with a personality trait.
  • Information encoded at higher levels of abstraction:
    • Is resistant to disconfirmation;
    • Implies high stability over time (i.e. going beyond one instance);
    • Generalizes across settings and interaction partners;
    • Supposedly reveals more about the person than it does about the situation.
15
Q

Maass et al. (1989), Study 1 (6)

(hint: linguistic intergroup bias)

A
  • Researchers presented 16 cartoons to members from two competing groups in a village during a festival.
  • Cartoon characters were either in the ingroup or outgroup (red scarves or blue scarves).
  • Looked at cartoon and had to describe whether it’s a desirable or undesirable behaviour.
  • Had to choose the best description of the scene, using the four different types of word choices (4 levels of abstraction: 4 being more abstract).
  • Participants used more abstract language when describing undesirable behaviours of outgroups and desirable behaviours of ingroups, suggesting that these undesirable behaviours are more diagnostic of their character.
  • More concrete language when describing desirable behaviours of outgroups and undesirable behaviours of ingroups, suggesting that these behaviours are circumstantial/exceptions.
16
Q

confirmation bias (1)

A
  • The tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one’s existing beliefs or theories.
17
Q

attribution error (1)

A
  • More likely to attribute other’s (negative) behaviour to internal and stable traits, more likely to attribute your own (negative) behaviour to external circumstances.
18
Q

How do confirmation bias and attribution error contribute lead to the same behaviours being perceived very differently? (2)

A
  • People perceive behaviour consistent with their expectations (confirmation bias).
  • People make different causal implications depending on group membership (attribution error).
19
Q

Duncan (1976) (7)

(hint: cartoons; attribution)

A
  • Gave a cartoon to participants that portrayed a black/white actor and black/white victim (four combinations).
  • Does the race of the actor and victim affect adjectives people use to describe the scene?
    • Black harm doer and white victim = more likely to be described as violent behaviour.
    • White harm doer and black victim = more likely to be described as playing around/dramatizing.
  • Participants then asked to make attributions, either person or situation.
    • Black harm doer = more likely to make person attributions.
    • White harm doer = more likely to make situational attributions.
20
Q

Macrae, Milne, & Bodenhausen (1994) (14)

(hint: stereotype efficiency)

A
  • Hypothesis: When a label (e.g. skin-head) is given to a person, participants ought to be better at processing stereotype consistent information than when no label is provided.
  • Dual-task paradigm: perform two tasks concurrently; measure performance on a second task as an indication of how many cognitive resources free beyond the first task.
  • If stereotypic thinking is cognitively efficient, people ought to do better on the second task when stereotypes activated vs. not.
  • Study 1: Participants completed a cued recall task for impression formation, then completed 20 MCQs about Indonesia (based on the auditory recording).
    • When given stereotype consistent info, participants remembered far more pieces of info when given a label.
    • Participants given a label answered more questions correctly.
    • Suggests that stereotypes are cognitively efficient by freeing up resources.
    • But were perceivers consciously using stereotypes as resource-saving tools or is this an unconscious process?
  • Study 2 used subliminal priming in a similar procedure and found weaker results.
  • Study 3 corrected some limitations to Study 2: participants may have given each task equal priority, if cognitive resources are intentionally shared between the tasks, the dual-task is no longer a measure of free resource.
    • Corrected by using a probe reaction task as a secondary task.
    • Were able to replicate the results of Study 1.
    • Supraliminal primes improve recall for stereotype consistent traits.
    • Supra & subliminal primes improve cognitive efficiency as measured by probe reaction task.
21
Q

How can we use stereotypes to maintain self-esteem? (4)

A
  • Criticism threatens self-esteem, we expend energy to justify ignoring criticism.
  • Stereotypes might play a role in justification: Activate stereotypes to justify forming a positive or negative impression.
  • Positive feedback, no threat → might inhibit stereotype activation to justify positive impression, validating the feedback.
  • Negative feedback is threatening → activating stereotypes that justify a negative impression can justify discounting this feedback.
22
Q

Sinclair & Kunda (1999) (13)

(hint: black doctor; feedback)

A
  • What role does motivation play in stereotype inhibition?
  • Study 1: Male participants completed an interpersonal skills questionnaire. Were then given feedback on how they did the questionnaire: either positive or negative. Race of hiring manager: either black or white.
    • Then had to do a word fragment completion task, and rated the evaluating manager using a questionnaire.
    • As expected, when people got negative feedback from a black manager, people were much more likely to use stereotypic word completions (e.g. WEL[FARE] vs. WEL[COME]).
    • In contrast, when they heard positive things, people weren’t activating their stereotypes.
    • In participants’ evaluations of the manager, when negative feedback was given by a black manager, people rated their skill as significantly less.
    • Conclusion: When motivated to think highly of a Black manager, people inhibit the Black stereotype. Otherwise, the stereotyped impression formation might have interfered with participant’s ability to form their desired impression of him.
  • Study 3: Replicated Study 1 with male and female participants. Feedback manipulation: positive vs. negative (control with no feedback); race of doctor: black vs. white.
    • Then completed a lexical decision task with neutral, doctor-related, or Black-related words.
    • Participants are far slower to respond to black-related words when given positive feedback by a black doctor (inhibition), and far faster when given negative feedback by a black doctor (activation).
    • Participants were much faster to respond to doctor-related words when given positive feedback by a black doctors (activation), and far slower when given negative feedback from black doctors (inhibition).
    • There was no significant difference for either condition with white doctors.
  • Implications: We selectively activate and inhibit categories. Motivation to protect our self-esteem can be one determinant of what identity is activated. Thus, our resultant impression formation based on group membership is flexible based on what categories we’re activating or inhibiting.