Stereotype Vulnerability Paper

My first article studied how negative stereotypes influence one’s academic self-knowledge. Stereotype vulnerability which is defined in the article as the tendency to expect, perceive, and be influenced by negative stereotypes about one’s social category was studied between Black college students and white college students. Researchers hypothesized that individuals most prone to stereotype threat and mistrust of feedback (stereotype-vulnerable individuals) would make less accurate judgments of their performances than their less vulnerable counterparts. Their second hypothesis was that stereotype vulnerability leads to ‘‘unstable efficacy,’’ academic self-confidence that fluctuates more readily and more extremely than it does for the average person. Researchers focused on African-American college students compared to white college students. Study 1; found that Black participants who were stereotype vulnerable seemed to have less clear academic self-concepts than other participants. Specifically, they exhibited more numerous and more extreme highs and lows in their academic self-efficacy than Blacks who were not stereotype

vulnerable and than Whites more generally. Blacks with low stereotype vulnerability, in contrast, had academic efficacy as stable as Whites’. Study 2, found that high vulnerability Black participants had greater instability in their academic efficacy than Blacks who had low vulnerability and whites.
This study is particularly relevant to my groups’ area of study because it addresses two of our main concerns: reducing stereotypes and stereotypes effects on self-esteem.

The study reveals that stereotype vulnerability—the tendency to expect and be bothered by prejudice and to be affected by stereotype threat—creates barriers to developing a stable conception of one’s academic abilities. T The study showed that Black participants who were vulnerable to these stereotypes were highly unstable in their academic self-confidence; meaning they were less certain of their ability to succeed. This is particularly important to my group because we want to study how stereotypes influence self-esteem and how they increase or decrease it. Hence; the more we know about how stereotypes influence our behavior the better we will be able to be to reduce

them.

Study 2 focused on how generalize people based on our stereotypes of people. When we meet someone our interaction with them is often influenced by the stereotypes we have about their race, gender and age. Although these social heuristics save time they can also be harmful to the perceiver and the person being perceived. Thus, this study looked at how we could control our prejudices of others. Researchers hoped to better understand the amygdala’s role in activating stereotyped knowledge but more specifically how it was affected by cognitive load, attentional capacity, and processing objectives. In order to study this, researchers manipulated participants’ social goals while measuring amygdala activity and stereotype activation. They hoped to determine whether a conscious shift in social-cognition might interrupt default stereotyped responses to a target from a racial out-group. An fMRI was used to White participants’ amygdala activity during presentation of unfamiliar Black faces and White faces while the participants performed each of three tasks: socially neutral visual search, social categorization, and social individuation. Experiment two used lexical priming to measure stereotype activation during the presentation of the same Black versus White faces while participants carried out the previous three tasks. The experiment showed that one’s cognitive goals do influence how stereotypes are activated.
This study is relevant to my group because it reveals that stereotype activation can be controlled by consciously shifting a person’s cognition. Thus, the results show that people can change the social context in which they view a target person and thereby affect out-group perception measurable in both the brain and reaction time behavior. Nevertheless, this is useful to my group because we are interested in how we can use priming to effect a person’s stereotype activation.