Current stereotypes: A little fading, a little faking (original) (raw)

The possibility that social-desirability-tainted responses emerge in the study of stereotypes is suggested and examined. Sixty white American subjects were randomly assigned to one of four experimental conditions. Subjects were asked to indicate how characteristic each of 22 adjective traits was of either "Americans" or "Negroes." This was cross-cut by a measurement variable: Half of the subjects responded in a rating situation in which they were presumably free to distort their responses. Remaining subjects responded under "bogus pipeline" conditions; that is, they were led to believe that the experimenter had an accurate, distortion-free physiological measure of their attitudes, and they were asked to predict that measure. The results supported our expectation that the stereotype ascribed to Negroes would be more favorable under rating than under bogus pipeline conditions. Americans were more favorably stereotyped under bogus pipeline than under rating conditions. A number of explanations for these results are discussed, and consideration is given to the relationship between verbally expressed attitudes and other, overt, behavior.