Stereotypes as energy-saving devices: A peek inside the cognitive toolbox.

Abstract

By use of a dual-task paradigm, 3 studies investigated the contention that stereotypes function as resource-preserving devices in mental life. In Study 1, Ss formed impressions of targets while simultaneously monitoring a prose passage. The results demonstrated a significant enhancement in Ss' prose-monitoring performance stereotype labels were present on the impression-formation task. To investigate the intentionality of this effect, in Study 2, the procedures used in Study 1 were repeated using a subliminal priming procedure to activate stereotypes. Subliminal activation of stereotypes produced the same resource-preserving effects as supraliminal activation did. This effect, moreover, was replicated in Study 3 a probe reaction task was used to measure resource preservation. These findings, which generalized across a range of social stereotypes, are discussed in terms of their implications for contemporary models of stereotyping and social inference. Human adaptation to the challenging and complex environment has often taken the form of developing that facilitate the execution of mundane but necessary tasks, leaving more time and energy available for other, perhaps more interesting or rewarding activities. It is reasonable to suppose, as some contemporary psychologists have, that the development of physical such as plows or printing presses, has been paralleled by the development of cognitive tools, or routine strategies of inference and evaluation (cf. Tooby & Cosmides, 1990) that permit a sufficiently effective analysis of the social environment to be accomplished in an efficient fashion. The benefit of such mental presumably lies in the fact that they free up limited cognitive resources for the performance of other necessary or desirable mental activities. Social psychologists have frequently characterized stereotypes as energy-saving devices that serve the important cognitive function of simplifying information processing and response generation (e.g., Allport, 1954; Andersen, Klatzky, & Murray, 1990; Bodenhausen & Lichtenstein, 1987; Brewer, 1988; Fiske & Neuberg, 1990; Tajfel, 1969). Building on this tradition, Gilbert and Hixon (1991) aptly characterized stereotypes as tools that jump out of a metaphorical cognitive toolbox when there is a job to be done (p. 510). Anyone who has ever succumbed to the temptation to evaluate others in terms of their social group membership would doubtlessly recognize the power of this contention. Individuation, in its many guises, is a rather