Implicit stereotyping and prejudice and the primed Stroop task

In recent years, stereotype theorizing has been dominated by the social cognitive approach (Park & Hastie, 1987; Schneider, 1991). This viewpoint has emphasized the importance of social categorization to the process of stereotyping and its researchers have attempted to understand not only the antecedents and consequences of categorization but also the link between categorization and stereotyping (Hamilton & Trolier, 1986; Tajfel & Turner, 1986; Taylor, 1981; Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher, & Wetherell, 1987). In general, categories are described as having a close and immediate tie with what people see and how they judge it (Allport, 1954). Once a person is recognized as belonging to a specific category, perceivers may infer that the person has many of the qualities shared by other category members. According to Taylor (1981), “Social categories are used as a means of organizing incoming person information. Stereotypes can be thought of as attributes that are tagged to category labels (e.g., race, sex) and imputed to individuals as a function of their being placed in that category“ (p. 110). Recently, Greenwald and Banaji (1995; Banaji & Greenwald, 1995) have emphasized the importance of distinguishing between explicit and implicit indices of stereotyping. Explicit measures of stereotypes operate in a conscious mode and are exemplified by traditional measures of these constructs (e.g., Katz & Braly, 1933). Implicit stereotypes, in contrast, operate in an unconscious fashion. Implicit stereotypes are “introspectively unidentified (or inaccurately identified) traces of past experience that mediate attributions of qualities to members of a social category” (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995, p. 15). Response latency procedures and other techniques, often borrowed from cognitive psychology, have been frequently used in social psychology to assess the content of implicit stereotypes (Banaji & Greenwald, 1995; Dovidio, Evans, & Tyler, 1986; Gaertner & McLaughlin, 1983; Hense, Penner, & Nelson, 1995), as well as implicit attitudes (Dovidio & Fazio, 1991; Dovidio, Kawakami, Johnson, Johnson, & Howard, 1997; Fazio, Jackson, Dunton, & Williams, 1995; Fazio, Sanbonmatsu, Powell, &