Reading focus
Syllabus: How Do Prejudice and Discrimination Arise—and Change?
Trace the evidence for knowing, activating, and endorsing a stereotype as different possibilities.
Why you’re reading it. Introduce a process explanation while examining how the priming task supports it.
A question to consider. What would distinguish a recruiter's knowledge of a cultural stereotype from endorsement, and which of those would a hiring audit reveal?
Why this reading
Knowing a cultural stereotype is different from endorsing it. Devine develops that distinction into an account of how a response can arise quickly and how people might regulate what they express.
Before you read
Priming makes information accessible through prior exposure. Automatic and controlled describe proposed processes; neither is directly visible in a questionnaire score. The studies compare White US students classified using a prejudice scale. Historical materials include derogatory racial language as research stimuli.
Read for
- Separate the stereotype-knowledge task, primed judgments of an ambiguous person, and deliberate thought listing.
- Ask what the awareness checks establish about the primes and what remains inferred about the process.
- Distinguish a nonsignificant difference between groups from evidence that their processes are identical.
Consider afterwards
- What comparison would distinguish activating a category from activating particular stereotypic traits?
- What additional evidence would connect these laboratory judgments to discriminatory treatment?
Editorial context
The paper's broad automaticity account exceeds any single comparison. Lepore and Brown (1997) distinguish category activation from direct stereotype-content activation, making the choice of primes consequential. Devine's studies do not establish that everyone has the same inaccessible beliefs or that knowing a stereotype is itself endorsement.