Stereotypic Explanatory Bias In Social Cognition

Stereotypic Explanatory Bias (SEB) emerges when one is more likely to provide explanations for behaviors that are inconsistent with expectancies relevant to people's stereotypes. As an index to measure implicit attitudes, SEB reflects the unintended influence of stereotypes on information processing. After the way of using SEB was introduced, in Experiment 1, the effectiveness of SEB to detect people's implicit gender stereotypes in social cognition was verified. In Experiment 2, how the SEB could predict people's later behaviors in social communication circumstance was explored. In Experiment 3, the comparison among the measure using SEB as an index, the traditional explicit measure on gender stereotypes and the modern Implicit Association Test was made.Results of the three experiments showed the following conclusions respectively. Firstly, SEB showed significantly a certain kind of implicit gender stereotypes, and there was no gender difference in this implicit attitude. Meanwhile, SEB also verified the fundamental attribution bias and the egotism attribution bias in people's attributions. That is, no matter which group one belongs to, he or she tends to make internal attributions instead of external ones, which is especially obvious when the behavior outcome is positive.Secondly, SEB predicted the subjects' choices to ask stereotypic questions in the later social interaction circumstances. However, SEB did not show any correlation with the research assistants' feeling of subjects' friendliness, which is the variable from the other side of social interaction.Finally, both SEB and IAT were able to detect implicit gender stereotypes significantly, while explicit measures could not. That meant the results showed the experimental dissociation between implicit and explicit measuring results. What's more, no correlation between any two of the three measures was significant. As far as the three measures' predictions for the behaviors in later social interactions were concerned, on one hand, IAT results and explicit measures could not predict subjects' choices to ask stereotypic questions, which was different from the SEB results. On the other hand, IAT and explicit measures showed no correlation with the research assistants' feeling of subjects' friendliness, which was the same as the SEB results.