Project Description. A great deal of research conducted over the past 50 years has demonstrated that stereotypes can have a powerful influence on peoples' behavior toward, and memory for, individual group members. In almost all of this work, however, participants are placed in relatively private settings, such that their responses are either confidential or completely anonymous. Although such methodological approaches have been used with considerable success in the development of precise models of stereotyping, this focus potentially leads to the development of theoretical models that may not necessarily generalize to other kinds of judgmental contexts. A central goal of the proposed research is to articulate the different processes that potentially guide stereotype use, depending on whether these stereotypes are activated in relatively private vs. public settings. The proposed research employs a number of methodological tools, such as response time measures, judgment, and recall. The proposed research also manipulates judgmental context: participants are informed that their impressions are confidential (private context), or that they will be discussing their judgments of the target person with one or more other people (anticipated public contexts). This program of research is expected yield a greater understanding of when, why, and how people express or suppress their stereotypes and gain insight into the automatic and controlled processes that mediate such effects. %%% Project Justification. Psychologists have long been interested in how members of privileged, dominant groups (e.g. Whites) use their stereotypes about racial minorities or other disadvantaged groups (e.g., Blacks) as a basis for reacting to a single member of the group. Although previous research has generated many valuable insights, most of this past work has studied stereotyping in relatively artificial settings. In particular, participants in this research are nearly always placed in private (anonymous) situations in which other people will not know how they respond to the minority person. Although such situations have the advantage of carefully controlling the nature of the judgmental setting, these kinds of studies are not able to address how people might use their stereotypes in more `social` (i.e., public) settings. The goal of the present research, therefore, was to better understand how people go about using their stereotypes in different ways, depending on the nature of the situational context at the time of judgment. This program of research is expected to yield greater insights into when, why, and how people go about using their stereotypes in relatively naturalistic contexts.
