A new study from researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison shows why letting stereotypes inform our judgments of unfamiliar people can be such a hard habit to break.
August 2, 2022
A new study from researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison shows why letting stereotypes inform our judgments of unfamiliar people can be such a hard habit to break.
Stereotypes are self-perpetuating in our minds, growing stronger with use just like information we actively try to cement in our memory.
«Think back to when you were in grade school learning your multiplication tables, and you would repeat and rehearse them in your mind—two times two is four, two times three is six, two times four is eight, and on and on,» says William Cox, a scientist at UW-Madison who studies prejudice. «Going through the world making assumptions about other people with stereotypes we’ve learned is another form of mental practice. With more rehearsal, those assumptions get stronger over time, even when we have no real evidence to back them up.»
In a series of studies published recently in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Cox and his co-authors, UW-Madison alum and former Cox Lab manager Xizhou Xie and UW-Madison psychology professor Patricia Devine, put more than 1,000 people to work on a stereotyping task that involved reading social media profiles and deciding whether the men in the profiles were gay or straight.
The experiment’s participants were told «about half» the men were gay, but unbeknownst to study subjects, the researchers had created the profiles themselves. One group of made-up profiles were seeded with stereotypical gay interests (shopping), another with stereotypical straight interests (sports), and a third group carried solely neutral, stereotype-irrelevant information.
After each of the first 20 answers—gay or straight—the profile readers got feedback that told them they were correct or incorrect, or they received no feedback at all. Then they read 10 more profiles split evenly between shopping- and sports-focused groups, while the researchers tracked the participants’ responses to see how the previous feedback affected their answers.
