The Influence Of Suppression And Cognitive Load On The Accessibility Of Stereotype And Couterstereotype

Stereotype refers to the fixed impression of certain types of people in accordance with social classification such as gender, race, age or occupation and so on. When Lippman introduced the concept of stereotype, he pointed out that stereotypes are obtained indirectly and have characteristics of simplicity, inaccuracy as well as high stability. Once formed, stereotype is very difficult to change according to the changing conditions. As a result, it will hinder the acceptance of new things and lead to prejudice, which will bring bad impact on people's social cognition and interpersonal communication. Based on this, people come up with the idea of counterstereotype—certain types of people with fixed impression will perform contrary to the stereotypes in people's mind. The purpose of this research lies in creating counterstereotype by restraining in order to improve the adverse effects of stereotype and find out the scope of suppression's function. Traditional researches discovered that suppression will make stereotype have the feature of ultra accessibility. The conclusion comes from comparisons between stereotype and stereotype-irrelevant.The choosing of exercises and options in the latest research proves that it is possible to attain the accessibility of counterstereotype. In our opinion, stereotype and counterstereotype have a one-to-one correspondence relationship. Because of this, when stereotype is started the scope of reactions related to it is the same as that of counterstereotype. So we can assume that there is the possibility that counterstereotype is also started when we suppress stereotype and counterstereotype is viewed as one of the options. From this we can infer that stereotype suppression should be able to lead to the accessibility of counterstereotype. Suppression can lead to the accessibility of both stereotype and counterstereotype. The purpose of experiment one is to find out the function of suppression to the accessibility of stereotype and counterstereotype by means of improving experimental conditions. 3(experimental condition: stereotype suppression group vs stereotype expression group vs control group)×3(word type: stereotype-consistent vs counterstereotypic vs stereotype-irrelevant) experiment design was adopted with"experimental condition"as between subject variable and"word type"as within subject variable. The dependent variable is the reacting time of stereotype words, counterstereotype words and stereotype-irrelevant words. Two processing systems of suppression: cognitive resources relied operating system and independent automatic monitoring system. Cognitive resources relied operating system is under the influence of cognitive resources while independent automatic monitoring system is not. These two operating systems have different requirements on cognitive resources. The operating systems will not work under low cognitive resources conditions which prevents the accessibility of options. On this condition, what remains in people's mind is the thought of suppression in monitoring system and the thought of suppression will achieve its accessibility. According to this theory, we add another variable—cognitive load into experiment two in order to find out the influence of cognitive load on stereotype and counterstereotype's accessibility on the condition of suppression. This experiment adopts two-factor mixed design of 2 (cognitive load: yes vs. no)×2 (word type: stereotype words vs. counterstereotype words). The cognitive load and word type are independent variables of which word type is within subject variable and cognitive load is the between subject variable. The cognitive load is to remember a string of letters:"wsdxglzq". The experiment adopts the task of words judgment i.e. whether the word exists or not. The dependent variable is the reacting time of stereotype words and counterstereotype words.The findings of experiments indicate that:1. By controlling experimental conditions we find out that suppression can lead to the accessibility of both stereotype and counterstereotype.2. Under suppression and when there is cognitive load, the accessibility of counterstereotype disappears while the accessibility of stereotype is not influenced.The two experiments of this research prove that suppression can lead to the accessibility of counterstereotype. But under the condition of cognitive load, the accessibility of stereotype occupies the dominating position and the accessibility of counterstereotype disappears. The cognitive load coincides with human's cognitive status in life, which shows that stereotype keeps great stability in spite of its relative flexibility. This proves once again that there is still a long way to go to"change stereotype".