Charles G. Lord

Considering the Opposite: A Corrective Strategy for Social Judgment

It is proposed that several biases in social judgment result from a failure--first noted by Francis Bacon--to consider possibilities at odds with beliefs and perceptions of the moment. Individuals who are induced to consider the opposite, therefore, should display less bias in social judgment. In two separate but conceptually parallel experiments, this reasoning was applied to two domains--biased assimilation of new evidence on social issues and biased hypothesis testing of personality impressions. Subjects were induced to consider the opposite in two ways: through explicit instructions to do so and through stimulus materials that made opposite possibilities more salient. In both experiments the induction of a consider-the-opposite strategy had greater corrective effect than more demand-laden alternative instructions to be as fair and unbiased as possible. The results are viewed as consistent with previous research on perseverance, hindsight, and logical problem solving, and are thought to suggest an effective method of retraining social judgment.

Effects of structured cooperative contact on changing negative attitudes toward stigmatized social groups.

The contact hypothesis predicts that cooperative interaction with members of a disliked group results in increased liking for those members and generalizes to more positive attitudes toward the group. The authors sought to provide evidence consistent with the hypothesis that contact affects attitude in part by eliciting a more positive portrait of the typical group member. Undergraduates participated in a 1-hr dyadic learning session (scripted cooperative learning, jigsaw cooperative learning, or individual study) with a confederate portrayed as a former mental patient. Students initially expected the confederate to display traits similar to those of a typical former mental patient. After the sessions, initially prejudiced students in the 2 cooperative conditions described the typical mental patient more positively and adopted more positive attitudes and wider latitudes of acceptance toward the group. Connections between intergroup attitudes and impression formation are discussed.

Alleviating women’s mathematics stereotype threat through salience of group achievements

Abstract Stereotype threat impairs performance in situations where a stereotype holds that one’s group will perform poorly. Two experiments investigated whether reminding women of other women’s achievements might alleviate women’s mathematics stereotype threat. In Experiment 1, college women performed significantly better on a difficult mathematics test when they were first told that women in general make better participants than men in psychology experiments. In Experiment 2, college women performed significantly better on a difficult mathematics test when they first read about four individual women who had succeeded in architecture, law, medicine, and invention. The results are seen as having implications for theories of stereotype threat, self-evaluation, and performance expectations.

Self-promotion is not ingratiating.

Pairs of subjects participated in two unstructured conversations spaced one week apart. In the second session, one subject of the pair was asked to participate either as an ingratiator or as a self-promoter. Naive target subjects clearly distinguished between presenters attempting to appear likable or competent. As verified by observer subjects, ingratiators used reactive verbal and nonverbal behaviors, whereas promoters used proactive behaviors. Preparation time did not produce differential behavioral tactics. The results are discussed in terms of the use of conversational resources to produce the attributions of likability and competence.

Which Behaviors Do Attitudes Predict? Meta-Analyzing the Effects of Social Pressure and Perceived Difficulty

A meta-analysis of 797 studies and 1,001 effect sizes tested a theoretical hypothesis that situational constraints, such as perceived social pressure and perceived difficulty, weaken the relationship between attitudes and behavior. This hypothesis was confirmed for attitudes toward performing behaviors and for attitudes toward issues and social groups. Meta-analytic estimates of attitude-behavior correlations served to quantify these moderating effects. The present results indicated that the mean attitude-behavior correlation was .41 when people experienced a mean level of social pressure to perform a behavior of mean difficulty. The mean correlation was .30 when people experienced social pressure 1 standard deviation above the mean to perform a behavior that was 1 standard deviation more difficult than the mean. The results suggest a need for increased attention to the “behavior” side of the attitude-behavior equation. Attitudes predict some behaviors better than others.

Attitude Representation Theory

Publisher Summary Attitude is considered the most distinctive and most indispensable concept in contemporary social psychology. The two enduring challenges to the attitude concept include the attitude-behavior problem and the attitude-object problem. Essentially, it is these two challenges that have formed the primary stimuli leading to the program of collaborative research for utility of the concept of general social attitudes. This chapter illustrates attitude representation theory, formalizes and extends its theoretical ideas. This is done in terms of two basic postulates—namely, the representation postulate, which states that a persons response to any attitude-relevant stimulus will depend not only on the perceived properties of that stimulus and the situation surrounding it, but also on the subjective representation of that stimulus by the person; and the matching postulate, which states that the closer the match between the subjective representations and perceived immediate stimuli to which a person is responding in one situation and the subjective representations and perceived immediate stimuli to which the person is responding in a different situation, the more consistency there will be in that persons responses.

Reversing roles: a cognitive strategy for undoing memory deficits associated with token status.

Tested whether having tokens (Ts) adopt the role of judge reduces cognitive deficits; examined several hypotheses to explain these deficits. In 3 experiments, Ss were asked to remember as many as possible of opinions exchanged in a group interaction with 3 actors. Experiment 1 demonstrated that judging majority members helped gender Ts improve their memory and ruled out self-denigration as a mediator of token deficits. Experiment 2 indicated that judging others was effective regardless of whether the others were said to know about it or not, ruling out insulation from evaluative scrutiny as a viable mediator for the judge role. Experiment 3 suggested the judge role restores completely the Ts, cognitive capacities and ruled out heightened responsibility as an explanation for the improved memory of judges. This work suggests that Ts may perform better if they can restructure cognitively their social environments.

Is a rose always a rose ? The role of social category exemplar change in attitude stability and attitude-behavior consistency

Three experiments tested whether changes in social category exemplars affect attitude stability, attitude-behavior consistency, or attitude change. In Experiment l, participants displayed greater attitude stability across 1 month, in several social categories, when they named the same rather than different exemplars. In Experiment 2, participants displayed greater attitude-behavior consistency toward each of 2 social categories when they named the same rather than different exemplars at behavior assessment and at attitude assessment. Participants who named a more likable exemplar behaved more positively, and those who named a less likable exemplar behaved more negatively, than their initial attitudes predicted. In Experiment 3, participants changed their attitudes in the predicted direction after estimating the height of an exemplar who was either more or less likable than the one they had earlier named. The results are interpreted as consistent with recent theory and research on attitude introspection, the matching hypothesis, and models of social judgment.

Does This Recession Make Me Look Black? The Effect of Resource Scarcity on the Categorization of Biracial Faces:

In-group biases are a ubiquitous feature of human social life (e.g., Brewer, 1979; Halevy, Bornstein, & Sagiv, 2008; Mullen, Dovidio, Johnson, & Copper, 1992; Tajfel, 1982). One explanation offered for these biases is that they arise from resource competition between groups (e.g., Kurzban & Neuberg, 2005; Schaller, Park, & Faulkner, 2003; Sherif, 1966). In this view, hostility toward the out-group is predicted to occur when people’s access to a resource is constrained (Pettigrew & Meertens, 1995; Takemura & Yuki, 2007; Wildschut, Pinter, Vevea, Insko, & Schopler, 2003) or when they seek to justify an existing resource advantage (Sidanius & Pratto, 1993). In the studies reported here, we extended this logic to test a novel prediction about in-group boundary formation—specifically, whether resource scarcity decreases the inclusiveness of racial in-groups. The cost of having unrestricted in-group boundaries may be relatively low during times of abundance. During times of scarcity, however, individuals may narrow their definition of belongingness to include only those whose group membership is unambiguous (Miller & Maner, 2012). We conducted two experiments in which people were primed with cues to scarcity or abundance and were then asked to categorize biracial faces as being Black or White. We predicted that willingness to include racially ambiguous individuals as part of their racial in-group would be lower in participants primed with scarcity cues than in participants primed with abundance cues.

Houses built on sand: Effects of exemplar stability on susceptibility to attitude change

Attitude representation theory (C. G. Lord & M. R. Lepper, 1999) explains both attitude-behavior consistency and attitude change with the same principles. When individuals respond evaluatively to an attitude object, they activate and combine assumptions about the attitude object with perceptions of the immediate situation. The assumptions activated can vary across time, even without additional information. Previous research has shown that individuals activate exemplars when answering attitude questions, attitude reports vary with the valence of the assumptions activated, and activating differently liked exemplars reduces attitude-behavior consistency. The present research completed study of the theoretical implications of exemplar stability by showing that individuals with temporally unstable exemplars, whether spontaneous (Experiment 1) or manipulated (Experiments 2 and 3), are more susceptible to subsequent attitude change than are individuals with stable exemplars.