Browsing by Subject "Stereotypes (Social psychology)"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    An Examination of the Error-Related Negativity, Stereotype Valence, and the Recognition of Racially Biased Errors
    (2012) Dix, Emily; Compton, Rebecca J. (Rebecca Jean)
    The Weapon's Identification Task (WIT; Payne, 2001) was used in conjunction with electroencephalographic recording to examine neural responses to racially biased versus unbiased errors in a paradigm pioneered by Amodio et al. (2004). The task was extended to examine four different kinds of stereotypes: Black-negative, Black-positive, Asian-negative, and Asian-positive. This extension was more effective for Black than Asian stereotypes; reaction time and accuracy data confirmed stereotype facilitation effects for the Black faces only. The predicted effect of a heightened response to racially biased errors relative to unbiased ones (first reported by Amodio et al., 2004) was not found: we did not see a larger-magnitude error-related negativity (ERN), an event-related potential (ERP) component, following the commission of racially biased errors. However, the data revealed consistent effects of racial information on responding, including differences in neural responses to minority versus White face primes and differences between Black and Asian blocks. A follow-up analysis of the Black blocks revealed an interaction that reached significance in the opposite direction of the ERN effect found in Amodio et al. (2004; 2006; 2008). Taken together, our results did not replicate the "Amodio Effect," but did demonstrate the sensitivity of the ERN to racial information. Hyper-monitoring in the presence of Black face primes and hypersensitivity to errors on Black face trials are discussed as possible explanations for our findings.
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    Bias in Evaluation: The Effects of Stereotypes and Environment
    (1995) Des Forges, Jessie B.; Cassidy, Kimberly Wright
    A study was designed to replicate and expand on Goldberg's 1968 study on evaluation bias. Evaluation bias is discrimination based on gender when assessing an individual's competence. 24 females and 24 males from Swarthmore College, and 42 females from Bryn Mawr College were asked to evaluate 3 published articles in the fields of Physics, Feminist & Gender Studies and History (perceived as masculine, feminine and neutral domains). Each article was written by a different author: a male, female, or an author whose name was initialized. The combinations of author and field of article were different for different groups of subjects. It was predicted that, as there was no individuating information about the author, the subjects would rely on stereotypes when evaluating the individual's work. The main hypothesis was that subjects would rate essays differentially according to gender of author; that is, raters would rely on negative stereotypes of women and thus women's work would be devalued. Another hypothesis, which was unique to this particular study, was that environment would influence the content of stereotypes; specifically, that students from a coeducational school would evaluate women differently than would students from an all female school. Results indicated that the articles were not differentially perceived and evaluated according to the name of the author; findings gave no evidence of evaluation bias. However, there were effects of school indicating the role of environment. Furthermore, almost all the significant effects were within the feminine domain.
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    Examining the Brain's Response to Errors Reflecting Race-biases
    (2012) Ramos, Laura I.; Compton, Rebecca J. (Rebecca Jean)
    Our study aimed to determine the effects of unintentional race-biases due to negative and positive stereotypes about Minority groups on error-negativity waves (ERNs), an event related potential (ERP) responsive to errors and conflict detection. We used a modified version of the weapons identification task (i.e., computerized priming task) (Payne, 2001) and recorded ERN amplitudes while participants completed the task. We hypothesized that the amplitude of the ERN differs as a function of the type of stereotype, face prime, and whether or not participants are explicitly told about potential race-biases. Previous studies have shown that ERNs are sensitive to race-biases and tend to be larger for race-biased responses (Amodio et al., 2004). Our findings showed that ERNs were larger for errors compared to correct responses, but the ERN for race-biased errors did not differ in terms of the stereotype valence. The results also showed that negative stereotypes about Blacks are rated as worse than negative stereotypes about Asians. Overall, the ERN amplitudes differed in terms of the types of stereotypes, but we failed to replicate Amodio et al.'s effect (2004) for Blacks and we did not find any race-related effects for Asians. Nevertheless, we did find stereotypical priming effects in terms of response time and accuracy (i.e., participants were faster at identifying stereotyped objects after Minority faces and they were less accurate at identifying neutral objects after Minority faces). Therefore, this study provides a basis for which future investigations of how neural mechanisms of automatic race-biases are examined by the brain.
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    Inclusion/Exclusion Model Applied to Facial Stereotypes
    (1999) Greer, Christine E.; Perloe, Sidney
    This study investigates the effects of facial stereotypes on subjects' judgments of a target person using Schwarz and Bless's inclusion/exclusion model (1992). This model states that the inclusion of a contextual stimulus in a target category results in assimilation toward the contextual stimulus and that the exclusion of a stimulus from a target category yields contrast away from the contextual stimulus. Subjects were presented with three ambiguous behavior descriptions each paired with either a baby, mature, or neutral-faced target female. Subjects then were asked to judge the target female along certain personality-trait dimensions relevant to the facial stereotypes. The hypothesis for this study was that by including the female target's behavior as part of her personality, assimilation to the facial stereotype would occur, and that by excluding the target's behavior from her personality, contrast against the facial stereotype would result. Our results did not show significant effects that supported this hypothesis; however we did find significant main effects for face type and story condition.
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    The Influential Nature of Stereotypes in the Formation of Judgments: The Evaluation Bias
    (1995) Steisel, Paula H.; Cassidy, Kimberly Wright; Perloe, Sidney
    The evaluation bias occurs when the same piece of work is judged differently depending on the sex of the author or producer of the work. The purpose of this experiment was to see whether men and women rate articles differently depending upon the gender of the author of the article. This experiment was conducted to examine the effects of the gender of the author, the school environment, and the gender of the rater on evaluations of three different articles in a male dominated, female dominated, and neutral field. Subjects read three articles with a male author, female author, and author with an initial in the three fields. Subjects from a coeducational and all female college rated the articles on five different dimensions: writing style, competency of the author in the subject area, persuasiveness, depth of the article, and quality of the article. There was no evidence of the evaluation bias in our study. Overall effects between male and female raters resulted in a main effect of gender of the rater for the female article so that women evaluated the female domain more favorably than men. It was hypothesized that women at all female schools would be more aware of discriminatory behavior and evaluate articles authored by males and females equally. Results showed that women from an all female school rated the female author of a feminine article less favorably than the women from a coeducational school. Another hypothesis was based upon the centrality of gender where individuals who find gender to be central are more likely to see themselves as part of the in-group, the category of female and therefore rate other females as individuals rather than base the ratings on stereotypes of the category, female. Due to the few subjects who placed their gender on the Who am I? test, this hypothesis could not be tested in this experiment.