The Flexible Correction Model: the Role of Naive Theories of Bias in Bias Correction

Life often presents us with situations in which it is important to assess the “true” qualities of a person or object, but in which some factor(s) might have affected (or might yet affect) our initial perceptions in an undesired way. For example, in the Reginald Denny case following the 1993 Los Angeles riots, jurors were asked to determine the guilt or innocence of two African-American defendants who were charged with violently assaulting a Caucasion truck driver. Some of the jurors in this case might have been likely to realize that in their culture many of the popular media portrayals of African-Americans are violent in nature. Yet, these jurors ideally would not want those portrayals to influence their perceptions of the particular defendants in the case. In fact, the justice system is based on the assumption that such portrayals will not influence jury verdicts. In our work on bias correction, we have been struck by the variety of potentially biasing factors that can be identified-including situational influences such as media, social norms, and general culture, and personal influences such as transient mood states, motives (e.g., to manage impressions or agree with liked others), and salient beliefs-and we have been impressed by the apparent ubiquity of correction phenomena (which appear to span many areas of psychological inquiry). Yet, systematic investigations of bias correction are in their early stages. Although various researchers have discussed the notion of effortful cognitive processes overcoming initial (sometimes “automatic”) biases in a variety of settings (e.g., Brewer, 1988; Chaiken, Liberman, & Eagly, 1989; Devine, 1989; Kruglanski & Freund, 1983; Neuberg & Fiske, 1987; Petty & Cacioppo, 1986), little attention has been given, until recently, to the specific processes by which biases are overcome when effort is targeted toward “correction of bias.” That is, when