PsychologicalDUAL-USE

Stereotype Activation

What it is

A cue — a name, a face, a word, a neighbourhood, an accent — brings a group stereotype to mind automatically, and the activated stereotype shapes judgment of the individual or the issue unless the perceiver has the motive, time and awareness to override it.

How it works

Patricia Devine's 1989 dissociation model separated knowledge of a cultural stereotype, which is activated automatically in nearly everyone, from personal endorsement, which governs whether the activation is corrected. In her studies, subliminal race-related words changed how both low- and high-prejudice participants read an ambiguous behaviour. Payne showed in 2001 that a Black face made people faster to identify a gun and, under time pressure, more likely to see one in a tool; Correll and colleagues found the same pattern in a shoot/don't-shoot task. The replication picture is mixed and must be stated: Mekawi and Bresin's 2015 meta-analysis found the reaction-time effects in shooter tasks reliable but the effects on actual error rates small and inconsistent; Bargh's behavioural priming results, such as walking more slowly after elderly-related words, failed to replicate when experimenters were blind; and Oswald and colleagues found implicit-association scores predict discriminatory behaviour only weakly. What is solid is the activation itself and its effect on the interpretation of ambiguous information. Persuaders use it by choosing the cue — the photograph, the name, the music, the word “urban” or “elite” — so that the audience judges a person or a policy through the stereotype without any claim being made that could be rebutted.

Real-world examples

  • •The 1988 “Willie Horton” advertising against Michael Dukakis paired a furlough policy with the mugshot of a Black convict; Tali Mendelberg's research on implicit racial appeals found such appeals work while they remain implicit and lose force once they are named as racial.
  • •In Britain the 2016 UKIP “Breaking Point” poster used a photograph of a queue of refugees to activate an immigration stereotype, while the 2018 spread of “gammon” as a label for older Leave voters activated a class and age stereotype from the other direction; each side recognised the tactic mainly when the other used it.
  • •Bertrand and Mullainathan (2004) sent identical résumés with white-sounding and Black-sounding names to employers and found the white-sounding names received roughly fifty percent more callbacks; the name alone activated the stereotype.
  • •Home-security and self-defence marketing leans on cues — hoodies, darkened streets, unfamiliar accents — chosen to activate a threat stereotype rather than to convey any crime statistic.

Ethical guidelines

Where the line is

Depicting the real people involved in a story or a policy, with the facts of their case, is honest even when the audience holds stereotypes; selecting or staging cues — a face, a name, a loaded word — because the stereotype they activate will do persuasive work that no explicit claim could survive is manipulation.

  • ●Choose images, names and words for what they convey about the actual case, not for the stereotype they will trigger; if an advertisement works only because of the face in it, it is trading on the stereotype.
  • ●When you must present a member of a stereotyped group, supply individuating information — the person's record, the specific facts — so the audience has something other than the category to judge by.
  • ●Do not deploy an implicit appeal you would refuse to make explicitly; if naming the appeal would discredit it, that is the test that it is manipulation.

How to defend against it

  • ►Ask what a message would look like with the cue removed: same policy, different photograph, different name. If your judgment shifts, the stereotype was doing the work.
  • ►Make the implicit explicit. Mendelberg's finding is that group appeals lose their force once named, so say out loud what the image or word was meant to evoke.
  • ►Slow down and individuate: automatic activation is strongest under time pressure and cognitive load, so for any decision about a person — hiring, renting, believing a witness — deliberately gather the specific record before forming a view.
  • ►Use Devine's own remedy: notice the stereotype when it comes to mind, label it as a cultural association rather than a fact, and replace it with the individuating information you have.
  • ►Treat a persuader's casting choices — who is shown as the criminal, the taxpayer, the elite, the victim — as content, and read laterally to check whether the image matches the demographics of the actual case.

References

  1. Devine, P. G. (1989). Stereotypes and prejudice: Their automatic and controlled components. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 56(1), 5-18 · link
    The dissociation model: automatic stereotype activation in low- and high-prejudice people alike, with controlled correction.
  2. Payne, B. K. (2001). Prejudice and perception: The role of automatic and controlled processes in misperceiving a weapon. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(2), 181-192 · link
    The weapon-identification task: racial primes speed gun identification and bias errors under time pressure.
  3. Correll, J., Park, B., Judd, C. M., & Wittenbrink, B. (2002). The police officer's dilemma: Using ethnicity to disambiguate potentially threatening individuals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(6), 1314-1329 · link
    The original shooter-bias task.
  4. Mekawi, Y., & Bresin, K. (2015). Is the evidence from racial bias shooting task studies a smoking gun? Results from a meta-analysis. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 61, 120-130
    Meta-analysis: reaction-time effects reliable, effects on actual shooting errors small and inconsistent.
  5. Doyen, S., Klein, O., Pichon, C.-L., & Cleeremans, A. (2012). Behavioral priming: It's all in the mind, but whose mind?. PLoS ONE, 7(1), e29081 · link
    Failure to replicate the elderly-prime walking-speed effect when experimenters were blind to condition.
  6. Oswald, F. L., Mitchell, G., Blanton, H., Jaccard, J., & Tetlock, P. E. (2013). Predicting ethnic and racial discrimination: A meta-analysis of IAT criterion studies. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 105(2), 171-192
    Implicit-association scores predict discriminatory behaviour only weakly.
  7. Mendelberg, T. (2001). The Race Card: Campaign Strategy, Implicit Messages, and the Norm of Equality. Princeton University Press
    Implicit racial appeals, including the Horton campaign, work while implicit and lose force once made explicit.
  8. Bertrand, M., & Mullainathan, S. (2004). Are Emily and Greg more employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A field experiment on labor market discrimination. American Economic Review, 94(4), 991-1013
    The résumé audit study: names alone changed callback rates.
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