In this chapter I have emphasized the view of stereotypes as guides to judgement and action. I have argued that they, and the categories with which they are associated, are indispensable cognitive devices for understanding, negotiating and constructing our social world. If this is the case, they would be poor guides indeed if they were com-pletely immutable, unable to change in response to new and maybe contradictory information. In this final section, then, I want to discuss some of the factors which give rise to stereotype change. This will not be an exhaustive treatment, however, since I want to return to this issue in greater detail in Chapter 9, when I consider how prejudice can most successfully be reduced. The focus there will be on the situational variables and social practices which are most likely to lead to a diminution of negative stereotypes and intergroup discrimination. Here I want to concentrate on how people deal with information which is inconsistent with their stereotypes. When does this lead to a revision of those beliefs and when, on the other hand, is it simply ignored or assimilated so as to leave the prejudiced ideas intact?
In the mid-1990s the British Open Golf tournament was held at Sandwich, a few miles from my then office. The particular course on which it was played, the Royal St George, was at that time one of the several golf clubs around the country to which women were still not permitted to belong. The proximity of this bastion of male chauvinism and the temporal coincidence of an all-male sporting event – belying the supposedly ‘open’ nature emphasized in its title – suggested to me that an example
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Stereotyping and Prejudice 99 from the world of golf would be an appropriate way to begin this discussion. Here is Bill Raymond, a male golfer with some very clear ideas about men’s and women’s abilities at the game:
Women don’t play golf, they play at it […] the average woman doesn’t need 14 clubs.
They could hit any of the bloody clubs from 100 yards. The average lady is much worse than the average man. They play a different game. They can’t play as quickly or as accu-rately. Everything’s got to be right from the head gear to the furry golf covers.
(Independent, 19 December 1990)
The question I want to consider is this: what kind of information about women’s golf-ing capabilities would it take to modify Mr Raymond’s belief in their inferiority?
Gurwitz and Dodge (1977) formulated two possibilities. On the one hand, they suggested, he might encounter many women golfers, each one of whom failed to confirm his stereotype in some respect. Perhaps one might be a prodigious hitter;
another might be able to hit her three-irons to land on a sixpence; another might care little for her appearance and break par on every round. The accumulation of such inconsistencies against his derogatory stereotype of women golfers might eventually lead him to change his view. On the other hand, another force for change might be for him to meet just a few very striking counter-examples to his stereotype; two or three champion golfers who can hit the ball long and straight, always break par, play quickly, and dress conventionally. Perhaps such obvious contradictions would compel him to revise his stereotype. Gurwitz and Dodge found some evidence for the latter process. In the context of stereotypes about college sorority members, they presented participants with information about three sorority members and asked them to pre-dict what a fourth one, their friend, would be like. In the experimental conditions of interest to us here, several pieces of information about the friends were presented which disconfirmed the traditional sorority stereotype. This information was either
‘dispersed’ amongst all three friends or ‘concentrated’ in just one of them. The par-ticipants’ ratings of the missing fourth woman were significantly less stereotypical in the latter case, which suggests that the ‘glaring exception’ can indeed induce a change in a group stereotype.
This will not always be the case, however, as was demonstrated by some subsequent experiments undertaken by Weber and Crocker (1983). Following Rothbart (1981), they called the change induced by a few strong exceptions ‘conversion’, and the change induced by many discrete disconfirmations ‘book-keeping’ (since it implied that stereotypes were modified by simply adding up the amount of inconsistent infor-mation). To these two models they added a third one, ‘sub-typing’, which they sug-gested could act to promote or to inhibit change in an overall group stereotype. To illustrate this effect, let us return to our beleaguered Mr Raymond. Suppose he does indeed witness some outstanding golfing feats by two women players. One conven-ient strategy for him is to place those two players in a special sub-group – perhaps
‘professional women golfers’– which then allows him to leave his more general stere-otype of ‘ordinary women golfers’ intact. In a typically apt phrase, Allport (1954) called this process ‘refencing’ and suggested that it was a common cognitive device which permits people to sustain their prejudiced beliefs even when they are con-fronted with contradictory evidence. However, sub-typing can also have positive
effects on stereotype change. Suppose Mr Raymond is continually faced with dozens of women golfers who do not fit his stereotype. Perhaps he sub-types some of them as ‘professionals’, others as ‘low handicap golfers’, others as ‘good around the greens’
– and perhaps some even as ‘sensibly dressed’. The proliferation of sub-types, neces-sitated by his exposure to a wide range of counter-examples, begins to render his original superordinate category of the ‘woman golfer’ (who dresses inappropriately and cannot play well) rather less useful to him. As a result, the global and negative stereotype becomes fragmented and hence less potent.
Weber and Crocker (1983) modified Gurwitz and Dodge’s (1977) procedure for providing disconfirming information, which was either ‘concentrated’ in a few members or ‘dispersed’ across several; this time the object was two occupational groups. They also varied the size of the sample of evidence from each group: there were six members in one condition, thirty in another (notice that both groups are larger than the group of three which Gurwitz and Dodge had used). In their sub-sequent judgements of the occupational groups, the participants were clearly influ-enced by the size of the sample, and hence by the absolute amount of disconfirming information. However, this cannot have been a simple ‘book-keeping’ type of change, since an even more significant factor was how the information was distrib-uted across the sample. When it was dispersed across many members, it produced a less stereotypical view of the occupational group than when it was concentrated, even though the gross amount of inconsistent information was the same in each case (see Figure 4.5; see also Johnston and Hewstone, 1992). Weber and Crocker also showed that sub-typing could help to explain the changes they observed. In a
Stereotypicality of ratings
8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 –1 –2 –3
6 members 30 members
Sample size
Control
Concentrated
Dispersed
Figure 4.5 Effects of different amounts and patterns of disconfirming information on subse-quent stereotypical ratings. Lower scores indicate less stereotypical judgement and hence more evidence of stereotype change. Source: Weber and Crocker, 1983, Figure 1
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Stereotyping and Prejudice 101 subsequent task participants were asked to sort the ‘stimulus persons’ into groups.
In the conditions where the disconfirmations were all concentrated into a few cases, participants typically formed only one sub-group (which consisted of those counter-examples); in the ‘dispersed’ conditions, by contrast, between two and four sub-groups were formed.
In another experiment, Weber and Crocker (1983) further clarified the role that this sub-typing process plays in stereotype change. They varied the representativeness of the disconfirming group members. Some were seen as highly typical of the group in spite of their manifesting counter-stereotypical characteristics; the others were seen as unrepresentative. The former class produced more evidence of stereotype change than the latter – a finding which was replicated in other research (see Hewstone, 1994). I shall return to this issue in Chapter 9, where it will be seen that the typicality of outgroup members with whom we have contact plays an important role in modify-ing our intergroup attitudes.
Gurwitz and Dodge (1977) found that concentrating all the contradictory infor-mation into one highly salient counter-example was more effective than dispersing it;
Weber and Crocker (1983) and Johnston and Hewstone (1992) showed the oppo-site. What could account for this discrepancy? One obvious factor is the size of the sample from which the consistent and inconsistent information is drawn. In Gurwitz and Dodge the experiment contained only three samples; in the other studies these varied between six and thirty. It seems, then, that the ‘conversion’ mode of stereotype change is only likely to occur when we have relatively few examples on which to make up our mind (notice that in Figure 4.4 the ‘benefits’ of dispersed information are most noticeable in the large sample). If the target group in question is also highly homogenous (as well as small), this composition is another factor which could favour the ‘conversion’ process. In this case, one or two striking counter-examples seem to be particularly effective in inducing stereotype change (Hewstone et al., 1992).
Until now we have only considered how the amount and patterning of discon-firming information can affect the revision of stereotypes. To conclude, we ought also to note that some stereotypes are easier to change than others. Rothbart and Park (1986) asked people to estimate how many instances of observable behaviour it would take to confirm or disconfirm that somebody (or some group) possessed each of a large list of traits. They also had to rate the favourability of each trait. One of the clearest findings which emerged from their study was that, the more favour-able a trait was, the greater the number of occasions needed to confirm it would have to be – and correspondingly the smaller the number of occasions needed to disconfirm it. The opposite held true for unfavourable traits. In other words, as Rothbart and Park (1986) put it, ‘unfavourable traits are easier to acquire and harder to lose than are favourable traits’ (p. 135). If we add this assessment to Maass’
(1999) linguistic analysis of ingroup and outgroup descriptions, which we discussed earlier – recall how she discovered that descriptions of negative outgroup behaviour tend to be couched in rather general and hence not easily falsifiable terms – then we are forced to a rather sobering conclusion about the difficulty of changing preju-diced outgroup stereotypes.
So far I have discussed how one might try to change the derogatory stereotypes of someone like Mr Raymond by exposing him to people or information that might contradict them. As we have seen, we should not be overly optimistic about the ease
with which this can be done. But maybe another strategy would be more effective.
Just as enlightened educators and managers might seek to curb racist or homophobic opinions in the classroom or workplace, could we not try to convince Mr Raymond to suppress his rather chauvinistic views on women golfers? Unfortunately such an approach might prove to be counter-productive, if we are to believe the findings of some research conducted by Macrae and his colleagues.
In a first series of studies, Macrae and his team (1994c) asked their participants to describe a typical day in the life of a skinhead who was shown in a photograph. Half of them (the experimental groups) were asked to do this whilst actively avoiding thinking or writing about their stereotypical preconceptions about skinheads. The remainder (the control groups) were given no such stereotype suppression instruc-tions. Sure enough, the experimental participants seemed able to comply with the suppression instructions they had been given, at least temporarily. The brief passages they wrote about the skinhead contained reliably fewer stereotypic references.
However, that was not the end of the story (or of the experiment). Macrae and col-leagues (1994c) were really interested in what would happen later, once the partici-pants stopped monitoring themselves for unwanted stereotypic thoughts about skinheads. Drawing on some earlier work by Wegner and colleagues (1987), who had found that, when people were specifically asked not to think of a certain idea, they subsequently showed an even greater preoccupation with that idea,7 Macrae and colleagues predicted a similar rebound effect with the stereotypes of skinheads.
They reasoned that the mental process of suppression requires some constant inter-nal monitoring (‘am I thinking about skinhead stereotypes as I write this?’), and this internal monitoring is likely to render those same stereotypical constructs more accessible. Whilst the (experimental) participants continue to exercise control over what they think and write, they will, indeed, be able to restrain themselves. However, once that control is relaxed – let’s say, when they think the experiment is over – those now hyper-accessible stereotypes are likely to rebound into action with renewed vigour. And so it proved. In one study, participants were led to an adjoining room where they expected to meet the skinhead whom they had been writing about. A jacket and a bag were left on a chair; the experimenter remarked that the skinhead must have popped out of the room for a minute and invited the participant to take a seat (seven other chairs were available in a line, away from the ‘occupied’ chair).
Remarkably enough, those participants who had previously suppressed their skin-head stereotypes on average chose to sit nearly a whole chair further away from the
‘occupied’ chair than did the control participants. In another experiment, the sub-sequent activity was a lexical decision task in which participants had to identify stere-otypical and non-sterestere-otypical words from non-words. Those in the suppression condition were reliably faster at recognizing words related to the stereotype of skin-heads than those in the control condition. Apparently the suppression experience had made those stereotypical words much more readily available to their conscious-ness (see also Macrae et al., 1998).
Fortunately, the news is not all bad for those who would attempt deliberately to suppress their own (or others’) less palatable stereotypes. Monteith and colleagues (1998a) have pointed out that ironical rebound effects of suppression are by no means inevitable. For one thing, the outgroups used as targets for stereotyping in the studies of Macrae and his colleagues were mostly those for which there were no strong norms
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Stereotyping and Prejudice 103 about the undesirability of expressing prejudice against them (for example skinheads, hairdressers). Perhaps with politically more sensitive groups (like black people or gays) the socially prescribed everyday suppression would have become sufficiently habitual to prevent the occurrence of any rebound effects (Monteith et al., 1998b; but com-pare Liberman and Förster, 2000). With such outgroups, it is possible that only dis-positionally more prejudiced people, for whom the outgroup in question is likely to be more readily accessible anyway, will show any rebound effects towards them (Monteith et al., 1998b). There is also evidence that rebound effects will only occur if people are sufficiently distracted cognitively to permit the unintended stereotypes to ‘leak out’ (Wyer et al., 2000).
An optimistic note on rebound effects has also been sounded by Förster and Liberman (2004). Contrary to the explanation of the phenomenon favoured by Macrae and colleagues (1994c) – heightened accessibility due to continuous internal monitoring – Förster and Liberman suggest that the ironical effects of stereotype sup-pression are better understood as a consequence of inferences that the participants in these experiments make about their own thought processes. According to Förster and Liberman (2004), participants in the classic ‘suppression’ conditions of the experi-ments may indeed find it hard to suppress their unwanted stereotypical thoughts. But the heightened accessibility that results then stems not from some internal and auto-matic monitoring process, but from a more deliberative inference about themselves.
The two authors explain the participants’ reasoning thus:
It is hard to write this story, and everything I can think of is, somehow, however remotely, related to the stereotype. It must be so difficult for me to write the story because I cannot use stereotypes. Without this restriction, it would have been much easier for me. It must be the case, then, that I really need to use stereotypes. (Förster and Liberman, 2004, p. 9)
This attribution of difficulty then enhances the motivation to think about the sup-pressed stereotype and, by so doing, increases its accessibility in the rebound phase.8 In a rather convincing confirmation of their theory, Förster and Liberman (2001) showed that the usual rebound effect of suppression could be eliminated through the simple expedient of telling participants that avoiding stereotypes was ‘difficult’, that some degree of stereotyping was ‘only natural’ and did not indicate that a person was prejudiced. Armed with this alternative explanation for their experiences in the sup-pression phase of the experiment, these participants showed very similar behavioural and attitudinal reactions to those of the participants in the no suppression control conditions, and markedly different responses from those of the participants who had only received the conventional suppression instructions.
For a final observation on the feasibility of persuading people to change their prejudiced ways, let me turn to the work of Kawakami and her colleagues (Kawakami et al., 2000; Kawakami et al., 2005). They had the idea that it would be possible to train people to change their automatic cognitive associations between certain out-group categories and various negative stereotypic traits. Their training method was simple: participants had repeatedly to respond affirmatively to the paired presenta-tions of a picture of an outgroup member (say, skinhead) and a counter-stereotypical trait (for example ‘frail’, ‘afraid’), but negatively to pairings of the same photograph with stereotypical traits (such as ‘nasty’, ‘dangerous’). By having their participants
just say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ respectively in literally hundreds of trials (480 to be precise), Kawakami and colleagues (2000) hoped that the old (bad) stereotypic habits would be weakened and replaced by new counter-stereotypical associations. To measure if this had happened, they used a version of the Stroop task. Remarkably enough, those in the stereotype negation training condition did show a significant reduction in their Stroop interference responses, whilst those in the control condition did not.
Furthermore, this training effect could still be observed up to twenty-four hours later, which thus proved that it was not merely a transitory phenomenon. In other studies, Kawakami and colleagues observed similar outcomes using blacks as the tar-get group. They also reduced gender discrimination in a mock personnel selection task (Kawakami et al., 2000; Kawakami et al., 2005).
Two points are especially noteworthy about these pioneering studies. One is that the training programme seems to be having an effect on people’s automatic stereo-typic activation. Remember that responses in the Stroop task are thought not to be readily amenable to conscious control. This, then, provides a nice addendum to our discussion, earlier in this chapter, of the supposed inevitability of automatic prejudice effects. It seems that such automatic cognitive responses, far from being immutable, can be modified by an intensive bout of reprogramming. Presumably even more dra-matic and long-lasting changes could be effected by a sustained re-education inter-vention. The second point worthy of noting concerns the similarity between the procedure used by Kawakami and colleagues (2000) and the stereotype suppression paradigm developed by Macrae and colleagues (1994c). A close reading of the proce-dure developed by Kawakami and colleagues (2000) makes it clear that this was, in fact, a form of stereotype suppression instruction:
Participants in the Skinhead Negation Condition were instructed to try not to think of cultural associations when seeing the photograph of the skinhead. Accordingly, they were asked to press ‘No’ on a button box when they saw the photograph of the skinhead and under it a word associated with skinheads. (Kawakami et al., 2000, p. 873, emphasis in original)
Thus, while a single episode of actively attempting to suppress stereotypes may prove counter-productive, many repetitions of the same suppressive act seem to break the stereotype mould. Here as in other walks of life, practice does seem to make (almost) perfect.
In this chapter I have confined myself mainly to a cognitive level of analysis – how information about groups is attended to, acquired, processed, forgotten and recalled.
In later chapters I shall also consider how more social and motivational processes can be brought to bear on intergroup relations so as to change the way in which members of different groups feel and act towards each other (see Chapters 6 and 9).
Summary
1 A stereotype is the perception that most members of a category share some attribute. Stereotyping arises directly from the categorization process, particularly the assimilation of within-group differences.
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Stereotyping and Prejudice 105 2 Stereotypes can originate from the culture in which people are socialized, and also from real cultural and socio-economic differences between groups. For historical, political and socio-structured reasons, members of different groups often occupy dif-ferent social roles in society. Stereotypes can arise from the inferences that people make about the psychological attributes necessary for the performance of these roles.
Such stereotypes will often serve as ideologies designed to justify the status quo.
3 Stereotypes may also stem from a cognitive bias which causes the perception of an illusory correlation between minority groups and infrequently occurring attributes. This bias was originally thought to lie in the ‘distinctiveness’ of infrequent conjunctions, but recent research suggests that it may derive just as much from a cat-egorial differentiation process or from a falsely perceived correspondence between actual correlations at a group level and correlations at an individual level.
4 The perceived entitativity, or ‘groupness’, of a social category can facilitate stereotyping, perhaps because it gives rise to a perception that the members of that group all possess some fundamental ‘essence’.
5 Stereotypes can influence people’s judgements of individuals, but this depends on the relative salience of individuating and group-based information.
6 A useful way of viewing stereotypes is as hypotheses in search of confirmatory information. Much evidence exists for this confirmation-seeking nature of stereotypic expectancies.
7 The activation and operation of stereotyping processes can occur below the level of conscious awareness; this is the so-called ‘automatic’ stereotyping. People can be subliminally or unobtrusively primed with category-related stimuli, and this can affect their stereotypic judgements of others and their behaviour towards them. Some have concluded that this means that some (unconscious) forms of prejudice are inevi-table. However, subsequent research has shown that automatic stereotyping phenom-ena depend on people’s prior and habitual level of prejudice.
8 Stereotypes also generate attributional judgements about the causes of ingroup and outgroup actions. A typical finding is that positive and negative behaviours adopted by the ingroup are attributed internally and externally respectively; for out-group behaviours the reverse applies.
9 Stereotypes may be used more if people are cognitively or emotionally preoc-cupied with other concerns. Such distractions are thought to consume their cognitive resources, thus paving the way for the labour-saving afforded by stereotypes.
10 Stereotypes can have self-fulfilling properties, creating in their targets the very attributes which are hypothesized to exist in them. Such self-fulfilling prophecies have been intensively investigated in educational settings.
11 Stereotypes may change in response to disconfirming information, but the patterning of that information (which can be concentrated in a few exemplars or dis-persed across many) and the valence of the stereotype undergoing revision are impor-tant factors in determining the extent of change.
12 Conscious attempts to suppress stereotypes can ironically result in their stronger reappearance later on – the so-called ‘rebound effect’. This may happen because the internal self-monitoring involved in suppression causes a covert priming of the very stereotypical constructs one is trying to inhibit. However, prolonged train-ing in the dissociation between category and stereotype can result in lessened subse-quent stereotyping.
Notes
1 Although these results are intriguing, some caution is in order because over 20 percent of the original participants in this experiment had to be dropped from the analysis for various reasons (Sinclair and Kunda, 1999, p. 896).
2 Note that this exposure time is much briefer than in parafoveal priming procedures. This is because the stimuli in this case were presented in the central part of the visual field, where our perceptual system is better able to detect objects.
3 In a typical Stroop task the participants’ task is to name the colour in which a stimulus word is presented. When the semantic content of that word is consistent with the ink colour in which the word is written (e.g. ‘green’ is written in green ink), or when the word has no special connotation for the participant (e.g. ‘table’), then colour naming proceeds relatively fast. On the contrary, if the meaning of the word conflicts with the ink colour (e.g. ‘red’ is written in green ink) or is especially significant for the participant (e.g. it is stereotypical of a previously indicated group – ‘Aborigines’, in the case of Locke and colleagues (1994) ), then one typically observes a slowing down in the response. The difference between the first and the second kind of trials is a typical measure of the Stroop interference effect (Stroop, 1935).
4 The causal links here may also be reciprocal. That is, those who saw the outgroup most stereotypically may well be more anxious over the contact. I am grateful to Tom Pettigrew for pointing this out.
5 These findings have always seemed particularly compelling to me. Many years ago I taught in a secondary school. My subject then was mathematics, which, at that school, was streamed by ‘ability’ after the first year. An abiding, and still saddening, memory from that experience was that of witnessing the systematic decline in numeracy over the differ-ent year groups. The contrast between the least able members of the first year mixed-ability class – always trying, always believing they would eventually master the subject – and their elder peers in the fourth and fifth-year ‘bottom’ sets – sullen, bored, convinced of their ineptitude – was striking indeed. The label ‘no good at maths’ had stuck with them, and also with us, their teachers, and we all – students and teachers alike – behaved accordingly.
6 Of which, regrettably, I myself am becoming only too aware!
7 I seem to recall a hilarious episode of Friends, the long running television show, which drew on this idea. As I remember it, much to his dismay, Chandler began to have erotic dreams about his prospective mother-in-law. And the more he tried to stop himself dreaming of her, the more vivid and disturbing the dreams became.
8 This account is rather reminiscent of Bem’s (1972) self-perception explanation of forced compliance cognitive dissonance effects.
Further Reading
Fiedler, K., and Walther, G. (2004) Stereotyping as Inductive Hypothesis Testing, chs 3, 4, 7.
Hove: Psychology Press.
Förster, J., and Liberman, N. (2004) A motivational model of post-suppressional rebound.
European Review of Social Psychology 15: 1–32.
Hewstone, M. (1994) Revision and change of stereotypic beliefs: In search of the elusive sub-typing model. European Review of Social Psychology 5: 69–109.
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