刻板印象错误知觉任务:区分刻板印象激活与刻板印象应用的新方法

Stereotype Misperception Task: A New Approach to Disentangle Stereotype Activation and Stereotype Application

刻板印象错误知觉任务(Stereotype Misperception Task,简称SMT)是一种能对刻板印象激活和刻板印象应用进行有效区分的研究范式,对应的多项式模型能对二者各自贡献量大小进行测算与评估。依托对二者关系的解构,介绍了SMT的操作程序、原理、多项式模型及其数据分析,比较了SMT和情感错误归因程序(AMP)以及四重模型的内在关联和本质区别,展望了未来的发展方向。

There are two distinguishable processes that underlie stereotypic impression formation： stereotype activation and stereotype application. Most previous research has used implicit measures to assess stereotype activation and explicit measures to assess stereotype application, which has several disadvantages. This paper introduces a measure of stereotypie impression formation, the stereotype misperception task （SMT）, together with a multinomial model that quantitatively disentangles the contributions of stereotype activation and application to responses in the SMT. In the SMT, participants are asked to form impressions of people whose faces are shown in blurred drawings. Participants work through several trials and judge each person, one at a time, on a certain trait. In other trials, the prime picture shows the face of a person belonging to another social group or a neutral stimulus, such as a facelike shape. For the purpose of the multinomial modeling, the SMT requires participants to make a dichotomous judgment of each drawing. When participants form an impression of the person shown in the blurred drawing, they may apply the activated stereotypes. As a consequence, stereotypes about the person shown in the prime picture may bias the impression of the person shown in the blurred drawing. Meanwhile, participants might be able to correct any bias if they are motivated to do so. Because participants have sufficient time to give their responses, it is possible to adjust the judgment on the basis of a theory about the direction of the bias. The SMT can be characterized as an indirect measure of stereotyping because participants are not asked to self assess the to-be-measured construct and the stereotypicality of participants＇ impression of the primes is inferred from their responses to the target drawings as a function of the preceding primes. There are four parameters in SMT＇s multinomial model： SAC （stereotype activation）, SAP （stereotype application）, D （detection of target trait） and G （tendency to guess）, each of which represents a particular process. The four processes together contribute to the final impression. Each of the four parameter values indicates the possibility of the process which may take place during the impression formation. The parameters are estimated from the observed frequencies of the two response options given a particular prime and target. Each branch of the process tree demonstrates a possible way to form impressions about other people and the sam of the parameter values of this branch is one possible way, among many,.of forming impressions. The SMT is modeled after AMP, and the most significant difference between them is the task. Finally, we point out some limitations of SMT and some future directions about the study of SMT. We hope that SMT can be a useful measurement tool that separates multiple processes underlying impression formation and that, with SMT, the researchers can advance research on stereotyping.