Stereotype Of The Efficacy Of Experimental Research

Stereotype is a kind of general stable viewpoint toward a certain social group. In 1922, Lippman had already pointed out that perceivers relied on stereotypes to simplify social perception. Since that time, psychologists have been exploring stereotype's efficie-ency in cognitive activity and several models have been put forward to explain the mechanism of stereotype's efficiency. First, according to "Schema Filter Model" .stereotype serves as a filter to facilitate the encoding and representation of consistent relative to inconsistent information in memory. Hence a lot of cognitive resources are conserved. There are two varieties of this basic filter model?Conceptual Filter Model"and "Attentional Filter Model". The former posits that stereotype can facilitate the understanding of the meaning of consistent information, but inconsistent information is difficult to understand. The latter posits that all attention is directed to the encoding of consistent information and inconsistent information may simply be ignored. Second, according to another model ?Associative Network Model", when there are enough cognitive resources, stereotype may facilitate the encoding of inconsistent information relative to consistent information by encouraging perceivers to carry out "inconsistency resolution". But when cognitive resources are limited ,the encoding of consistent information is better than the encoding of inconsistent information, because perceivers haven't enough capacity to carry out "inconsistency resolution" and meantime stereotype provides conceptual fluency for consistent information.In real-world, facing all kinds of information, perceivers in fact haven't enough cognitive resources. If the two model's hypotheses are correct ,more consistent than inconsistent information will enter people's memory and stereotype will become more difficult to change. However, an efficient cognitive system must encode not only invariances (consistent information) in the environment, which encourage the development of expectancies, but also variances(inconsistent information), which suggest that expectancy may not be entirely accurate and that reorientation may be necessary. Sherman's (1998) experiments indicated that: as for conceptual encoding ,the encoding of consistent information was better than that of inconsistent information; as for perceptual encoding, the encoding of inconsistent information was better than that of consistent information. After efforts were made to complement and deepen Sherman's viewpoint through theoretical analysis and summarizing many former experiment results, an "Encoding Flexibility Model" was formed. According to this model, stereotype facilitates the encoding of both consistent and inconsistent information at the same time in differentways. When resources are limited, stereotype facilitates the conceptual encoding of consistent information by providing interpretive frameworks, accordingly the perceptual encoding of consistent information will be reduced. Because the basic gist of this information may be extracted with relatively little efforts, lots of cognitive resources will be conserved. Since inconsistent information has high informational value, resources that are conserved through the conceptual fluency of consistent information may be redirected to assist in the encoding of inconsistent information. However, only the perceptual details of the inconsistent information are thoroughly encoded, but the meaning of this information may become more difficult to understand, because it is inconsistent with perceiver's expectancy. Therefore, when resources are limited, stereotype facilitates the encoding of both consistent and inconsistent information. In short, when resources are scare, attention allocation favors inconsistent information, stereotype facilitates the perceptual encoding of inconsistent information and inhibit that of consistent information; meantime stereotype facilitate the conceptual encoding of consistent information and inhibit that of inconsistent information. Through...