ABSTRACTS This research will investigate implicit sterotypes and attitudes. These evaluations are predicted to occur when critical attributes of a social stimulus that control judgment (e.g., stimatizing attibutes such as gender, race, SES) are not at the respondent's focus of attention. In Part 1, a procedure will be used in which the attribute of fame is incorrectly assigned as a result of a bias in memory caused by perceptual familiarity. This procedure is used to identify that equal familiarity with male and female names results in a higher probability of assigning false fame to male than female names. Variations of this procedure will be used to identify the unconscious nature and limiting conditions of this bias, Part 2 will establish the generality of this phenononmenon to another social category, by using names that vary in perceived race and ethnicity, and judgments such as criminal and politician. Part 3 will present a method to study implicit attitudes, and attempts to conceptually differentiate the (cognitive) stereotype construct from the (affective) attitude construct. This research is designed to examine whether discrimination can be controlled by implicit stereotypes even in the presence of positive implicit attitudes. Together, the 3-part program of research seeks to demonstrate the value of implicit measures of stereotyping and prejudice, to provide understanding of the subtle yet powerful information processing mechanisms by which biases in evaluation are produced, and to question the currently dominant conception that such evaluations operate primarily within consciousness.
