Intergroup Biases and the Cognitive Dynamics of Stereotype Formation

We propose that cognitive and motivational processes—generally treated as largely independent phenomena—interact in stereotype formation and maintenance such that purely cognitive processes are altered by ingroup-protective biases associated with own group membership. We report four studies on illusory correlation formation showing that processing of group-relevant information by group members, in contrast to unaffiliated observers, is guided by an initial categorization-based ingroup bias.