Automatic and Controlled Components of Prejudice Toward Fat People: Evaluation Versus Stereotype Activation

This study investigated automatic and controlled components of anti-fat attitudes, the relationship between these components, and the extent to which each component predicts prejudicial behavior. Participants were primed with pictures of fat and thin women. Automatic activation of both evaluative responses and Stereotypic knowledge were examined with lexical decision judgments on fat-stereotypical, thin-stereotypical, and stereotype-irrelevant trait words. Results showed greater automatic activation of negative evaluations to fat than thin women. Although, in general, automatic measures were found to be unrelated to self-reported anti-fat attitudes, one subcomponent of automatic evaluation was correlated with higher expressed dislike of fat persons. In addition, the automatic but not the controlled attitudinal measure predicted how far participants chose to sit from a fat woman. No stereotypicality effects were observed. Implications for reducing prejudice toward fat persons are discussed. Gayle R. Bessenoff and Jeffrey W. Sherman, Department of Psychology, Northwestern University

Stereotypes as Source-Monitoring Cues: On the Interaction Between Episodic and Semantic Memory

This research examined the use of stereotypic expectancies as source cues for biographical memories. Participants were more likely to misattribute stereotypical than counterstereotypical behaviors to a target person. However, this was true only when the original source of the behaviors was difficult to assess (there was source confusion) and recollective processes were impaired. Thus, when recollection of episodic details is disrupted, perceivers may still rely on semantic knowledge to interpret memories. These results demonstrate that stereotype use is efficient not only during the encoding of social information, hut also during its retrieval. However, there are also significant costs associated with using stereotypes as source cues. Implications of these findings for social perception and eyewitness testimony are discussed