Stereotypes Disrupt Probabilistic Category Learning

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Racial stereotypes exert pernicious effects on decision-making and behavior, yet little is known about how stereotypes disrupt people’s ability to learn new associations. The current research interrogates a fundamental question about the boundary conditions of probabilistic learning by examining whether and how new learning is influenced by pre-existing associations. Across three experiments, participants learned the probabilistic outcomes of different card combinations based on feedback in either a social (e.g., forecasting crime) or nonsocial (e.g., forecasting weather) learning context. During learning, participants were presented with either task-irrelevant social (i.e., Black or White faces) or non-social (i.e., darker or lighter clouds) stimuli that were stereotypically congruent or incongruent with the social and nonsocial learning context. Participants exhibited learning disruptions in the social compared to nonsocial learning context, despite repeated instructions that the social and non-social stimuli were unrelated to the outcome (Studies 1-2). We also found no differences in learning disruptions when participants learned in the presence of negatively- (Black and criminal) or positively-valenced stereotypes (Black and athletic; Study 3). Finally, we tested whether learning decrements were due to “first order” stereotype application or inhibition at the trial-level, or due to “second order” cognitive load disruptions that accumulate across trials (Aggregated Analysis). We found no evidence of first order disruptions and instead found evidence for second-order disruptions: participants who were more internally motivated to respond without prejudice, and thus more likely to self-monitor their responses, learned less accurately over time. We discuss the implications for the influence of stereotypes on learning and memory.