Stereotype formation and endorsement: The role of implicit theories.

Abstract

Five experiments supported the hypothesis that peoples' implicit theories about the fixedness versus malleability of human attributes (entity versus incremental theories) predict differences in degree of social stereotyping. Relative to those holding an incremental theory, people holding an entity theory made more stereotypical trait judgments of ethnic and occupational groups (Experiments 1, 2, and 5 ) and formed more extreme trait judgments of novel groups (Experiment 3 ). Implicit theories also predicted the degree to which people attributed stereotyped traits to inborn group qualities versus environmental forces (Experiment 2). Manipulating implicit theories affected level of stereotyping (Experiment 4), suggesting that implicit theories can play a causal role. Finally, implicit theories predicted unique and substantial variance in stereotype endorsement after controlling for the contributions of other stereotype-relevant individual difference variables (Experiment 5). These results highlight the importance of people's basic assumptions about personality in stereotyping.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 969 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.