Stereotypes (beliefs) about groups of people influence prejudice against the same groups.

What is it about?

People often distinguish between the behaviors and attributes they associate with groups of people (stereotypes) from how they evaluate the same groups (prejudice). For instance, you may have the stereotype that people in the US-American South drink iced tea all the time, and this might be more or less accurate for individual people (it's a stereotype), but this may not be positive or negative for you, it's just a drink. Hence, in many cases stereotypes can be independent of prejudice - you can have stereotypic beliefs about people towards whom you have positive, negative, or neutral feelings. But are stereotypes and prejudice always independent? When you think about the stereotype "people from the North are stiff" that may sound negative to some people, and you surely can think of many stereotypes that are even more negative, inaccurate, and even vile and hurtful at times. For instance, think about ethnic groups who are stereotyped as "uneducated" or even "criminal" just by their outer appearance. Those kinds of stereotypes do not sound neutral, and it would be hard to believe that they are unrelated to prejudice. This has caused confusion in the literature. Most social psychology text books explain that stereotypes and prejudice are independent, but a lot of empirical findings they say are empirically related. In fact, one can find almost as many papers citing independence of the constructs as there are papers showing they are related, with some authors citing that they find relations for some groups but not for others. Many papers have been published where authors emphasize how much their findings question previous findings. With the present work we wanted to clarify some of this confusion by laying out the theoretical rules for when and how stereotyping and prejudice should be related. In two studies, we show that the valence of a stereotype determines prejudice. Hence if your feelings towards a behavior become negative, you may become more prejudiced towards a group who shows that behavior even when you technically haven't learned anything new about the group itself (but only about a behavior you associate with them). Similarly, when you learn to like a behavior or characteristic, you become less prejudiced towards groups who exert this behavior, and this may again happen even when you don't learn anything new about the group itself. In the paper we show this pattern first with fictitious groups of aliens and fictitious words, and then with real groups and real attributes. For the real-group demonstration, we had participants write about the benefits of leading a mentally fit lifestyle or the benefits of leading a physically active lifestyle. This manipulation was aimed at making participants think of intelligence or athleticism as positive attributes. Then we measured their prejudices for or against athletes (stereotypically athletic) as opposed to scientists (stere typically intelligent and mentally fit). In line with hypotheses, participants who thought positively about athleticism showed a preference for athletes over scientists, but when they thought positively about intelligence (mental fitness), this preference was gone. In the next two studies, we show the reverse pattern: More or less prejudice leads to different stereotypes. The more prejudiced you are against a group, the more negative behaviors and attributes will come to mind when you think about the group. And vice versa, the more you like a group, the more positive behaviors and attributes will come to mind when you think about them. Empirically, we showed this by showing people pictures of African Americans either paired with only positive other pictures, or paired with only negative other pictures (a procedure called evaluative conditioning). Then we measured all participants' stereotypes of African Americans as athletic or aggressive. In line with hypotheses, participants who were shown pictures of African Americans with positive images showed stronger stereotyping of African Americans as atheletic (a positive stereotype) than aggressive, whereas those participants who had seen pictures of African Americans with negative images stereotyped them as more aggressive than athletic. We show all of this with implicit measures. So these studies are not just about the stereotypes and prejudices people report, but also about their implicit biases. Hence, all of the examples in the beginning are true. If iced tea is truly a neutral drink to you, then our studies suggest that the stereotype "all Southerner drink iced tea" would indeed be unrelated to prejudice. However, if you develop a disliking for iced tea, then this stereotype may lead to negative feelings about Southerners, whereas learning to like iced tea may lead to more liking of southerners, even though you didn't actually learn anything new about Southerners in either case. Similarly, prejudice leads to negative stereotypes. In other words, very negative stereotypes about certain ethnic groups being "criminal" are indeed more likely to be held by more prejudiced people than less prejudiced people. If you learn to dislike a group, you will become more likely to think that this group exerts negative behaviors and has negative characteristics, even if you have not gathered new information about whether the group's behavior has changed. When you become less prejudiced against a group, on the other hand, you will be more likely to bring to mind positive behaviors of the group, independent of whether you see new behavior. Hence, less prejudice towards a group leads to more positive stereotypes about the same group even in the absence of new semantic information. Similarly, more prejudice leads to more negative stereotypes. In sum, the purpose of this paper was to bring some clarity to debates in which researchers claim that their findings question all previous findings. Some stereotypes are related to prejudice, while others aren't, and this depends on the valence of the stereotypes. And the relationship is causal. When your feelings towards behaviors change, then your feelings towards groups exerting those behaviors will change too. We hope this theoretical model will bring clarity to how researchers and laypeople conceptualize stereotypes and prejudice and why they are related sometimes, unrelated at other times, while sometimes their relationship changes over time.

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Why is it important?

The relation between stereotypes and prejudice has been presented in very conflicting ways, with just as many papers arguing for no relationship as papers arguing for a strong relationship. We wanted to show how all of these findings can be true at the same time, and why. Our paper lays out a precise model for the relation between stereotypes and prejudice.