The Effects of a Perceived Causal Relationship on the Strength of Stereotypes
This study examined the application of the causal-model theory (Rehder, 2003) to social categorization, more specifically the maintenance of gender stereotypes. According to this theory, the maintenance of categories are strengthened by the perception of causal relations among features. This study sought to determine if humans adopt stronger stereotypic tendencies if the stereotypic traits, i.e., features typically associated with the stereotyped individual, are presented as causally connected. A 2 x 3 x 2 design was conducted in which seventy-two participants read an article containing evidence, either confirming or disconfirming a gender stereotype, in the form of one of two treatment conditions: information which explicitly links gender traits as causal relationships or information which presents the same features with no obvious causal linkage. The study included three independent variables: causal association (between features of a stereotype), the nature of stereotype information (stereotype confirming, disconfirming, or neutral), and the blocking variable gender. Each subject was randomly assigned to one of six treatment groups (without replacement). The two dependent measures determined the stereotypic tendencies explicitly using a modified version of gender-science explicit survey scale measure employed by Nosek, Banaji, and Greenwald (2002) and implicitly using the Implicit Association Test (IAT) method by the same authors. The first measure, a Likert survey, was used to access explicit attitudes regarding associations between gender and math/science. The second measure, the IAT, followed the principle that a stimulus is responded to more slowly when it contains multiple features that would require different responses if examined in isolation (Wittenbrink & Schwarz, 2007).The data was analyzed quantitatively using MANOVA to determine any significant differences in stereotypic tendencies between those subjects which received the causally connected treatments and those that did not. Results indicated that causal associations do affect stereotypic tendencies; however, the changes in stereotypic attitude may only be detected by implicit measures. These findings suggest that implicit stereotypes are affected by perceived causal connections between features of those stereotypes. This further implies that educational methods, intended to remediate implicit stereotypic attitudes, should be designed to address any direct or indirect causal associations of the stereotypes.
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