Testing Hypotheses about Human Nature: Assessing the Accuracy of Social Stereotypes

These investigations examined the evidence-gathering strategies that people formulate when they intend to use social interaction with individual members of stereotyped groups as opportunities for assessing the accuracy of social stereotypes. Participants prepared to assess the accuracy of one of two occupational stereotypes (either a stereotype about the category of counselors or a stereotype about the category of researchers) by choosing a series of questions to ask a target member of that occupational category in a forthcoming interview. In the first investigation, participants planned to assess the accuracy of these stereotypes by preferentially soliciting, by means of the questions they chose to ask, evidence of behaviors and experiences whose presence would tend to confirm the accuracy of the stereotype under scrutiny. Moreover, in the first investigation, four separate attempts to convey to participants the potential utility of attempting to solicit evidence of ways in which people disconfirm stereotypes (“educational interventions”) failed to have any detectable impact on participants' evidence-gathering strategies. However, in the second investigation, an intervention designed to sensitize individuals to the impression-management implications of stereotype-testing activities in social interaction induced participants to solicit both stereotype-confirming and stereotype-disconfirming evidence. Possible reasons for the differential impact of the educational and the impression-management interventions, as well as the role that stereotype-testing strategies may play in the maintenance and perpetuation of general social stereotypes, are discussed.