Steven Fein

Automatic Activation of Stereotypes: The Role of Self-Image Threat

Does self-image threatening feedback make perceivers more likely to activate stereotypes when confronted by members of a minority group? Participants in Study 1 saw an Asian American or European American woman for several minutes, and participants in Studies 2 and 3 were exposed to drawings of an African American or European American male face for fractions of a second. These experiments found no evidence of automatic stereotype activation when perceivers were cognitively busy and when they had not received negative feedback. When perceivers had received negative feedback, however, evidence of stereotype activation emerged even when perceivers were cognitively busy. The theoretical implications of these results for stereotype activation and the relationship of motivation, affect, and cognition are discussed.

Suspicion and Dispositional Inference

The role of suspicion in the dispositional inference process is examined. Perceivers who are led to become suspicious of the motives underlying a targets behavior appear to engage in more active and thoughtful attributional analyses than nonsuspicious perceivers. Suspicious perceivers resist drawing inferences from a targets behavior that reflect the correspondence bias (or fundamental attribution error), and they consciously deliberate about questions of plausible causes and categorizations of the targets behavior They are, however, quite willing to make strong correspondent inferences about the target if they learn additional contextual information that renders alternative explanations for the targets behavior less plausible. Implications of these findings for current multiple-stage models of the dispositional inference process are discussed, and the need for these and other models to give more consideration to the social nature of social perception is asserted.

Maintaining One's Self-Image Vis-à-Vis Others: The Role of Self-Affirmation in the Social Evaluation of the Self

Three studies examined how people maintain their self-images when they face threat to interpersonal aspects of the self. In Studies 1 and 2, we found evidence that low self-esteem people lower their estimates of their performance when they expect immediate feedback in order to protect themselves from the interpersonal threat inherent in such feedback, and that self-affirmation reduces this tendency among low self-esteem people. In Study 3, we found that when people are self-affirmed they are more likely to engage in upward social comparisons and less likely to engage in downward social comparisons. Together these findings suggest that people can cope with threats to interpersonal aspects of the self by affirming other important aspects of the self.

Temper and Temperature on the Diamond: The Heat-Aggression Relationship in Major League Baseball

Archival data from major league baseball games played during the 1986, 1987, and 1988 seasons (total N = 826 games) were used to assess the association between the temperatures at the games and the number of batters hit by a pitch during them. A positive and significant relationship was found between temperature and the number of hit batters per game, even when potentially confounding variables having nothing to do with aggression were partialed out. A similar relationship was found for games played during the 1962 season. The shape of this relationship appears to be linear, suggesting that higher temperatures lead major league pitchers to become more aggressive in pitching to batters.

Typicality effects in attitudes toward social policies: A concept-mapping approach.

Social typicality effects occur when people apply their attitudes more consistently toward typical than toward atypical category members-presumably because attitudes are directed toward the prototypic category member. Four studies tested whether individuals also apply social policy attitudes more consistently toward typical than toward atypical persons affected by the policy