Research - Gut reactions about racial stereotypes can change

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By Heather Travis
Thursday, October 9, 2008
A method used to predict voter preferences can also be used to understand racial stereotyping, says University of Western Ontario researcher Bertram Gawronski.
 
 
Associate Psychology professor Bertram Gawronski’s research is helping people to override their gut reactions with behavioural responses that coincide with their beliefs.
 
 
The associate professor of psychology and Canadian Research Chair in Social Psychology is making waves early in his career with his exploration of the two key ways that people behave – automatic or ‘gut reactions’ and more controlled, reflective decision-making.
 
With the upcoming U.S. presidential elections, his timely research collaboration with the University of Padova, Italy, examining how automatic mental associations can predict the voting choices of undecided voters, has increased the profile of his work.
 
The study received widespread media attention because of the implications of undecided voters, who may determine the outcome of the election, having already made up their mind on a subconscious level.
 
However the scope of his research goes beyond the political arena into racial stereotyping, including surprising evidence our gut reactions to race can be changed, and that the media plays a role in our stereotypes.
 
Gawronski began his academic career as a Chemistry degree major in Germany, but was more interested in a different kind of reaction – how people’s behaviours do not always fall in line with their beliefs.
 
“I became interested in how people can believe one thing, (and) can do something else.”
 
His research has focused on the conflict between reflective and impulsive behaviours, discovering where they come from and seeing how they can be changed.
 
Conscious beliefs, says Gawronski, depend on consistent and factual information. Our more controlled responses and behaviours are based upon this information.
 
However, Gawronski argues gut reactions are most often driven by co-occurrences between an object and a positive or negative response.
 
In other words, if we repeatedly see two things together, we draw a link between them, whether or not they are related. This mental association influences our gut reactions.
 
Gawronski says these associations can manifest in racial prejudices.
 
A person with strong egalitarian beliefs may still have a negative response to black people if they have subconscious associations that link black people and criminality, for example.
 
To develop this theory, Gawronski took an approach that diverges from traditional schools of thought emphasizing human rationality, which he says falls short in explaining why people sometimes act contrary to their beliefs. Similarly, the theory that humans are completely irrational does not account for calculated behavioural responses.
 
Instead, he is applying a model that integrates the determinants of reflective and impulsive behaviours and explains how the two can interact.
 
In a lab study, Gawronski asked participants to examine images of black and Caucasian people paired with words of positive and negative stereotypes about the two racial groups (e.g. a picture of a black male and the word ‘hostile’).
 
In one condition, participants were told to issue a response if they didn’t feel the characteristic was true of the racial group.
 
In another condition, participants were shown the same images and terms and were asked to issue an affirmative response each time they saw a counter-stereotype face-trait combination (e.g. black people are friendly).
 
“We found a significant reduction in people’s negative affective reactions towards black people when they affirmed the counter-stereotype. But, we actually found an increase in people’s negative affective responses when they negated the stereotype,” he says.
 
In other words, participants had more negative gut reaction towards black people when they were told to respond ‘no’ each time they were shown an image and word combination that confirms a stereotype, for example, black people are criminals. On the flip side, participants had more positive gut reactions towards black people when they were asked to respond ‘yes’ to counter stereotypical traits of black people (e.g. Black people are friendly).
 
What this means is that when people negate something – or say that black people are not criminals – they might actually strengthen the connection between the two images or ideas, says Gawronski. For example, if a person is told not to think of a white bear, they will automatically do the opposite and think of the bear, he explains.
 
Media exposure greatly influences the formation of these positive or negative responses towards a person or object, he adds.
 
Repeatedly showing images together or combining terms can affect what people believe, he says, by conditioning an association between the two things.
 
“There are certain clichés and stereotypes that are still incorporated in media … its mere co-occurrence and that creates these associations that then lead to these impulsive reactions,” he says.
 
The co-occurrence of the names of Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden during speeches by US President George W. Bush creates a mental association between the men in people’s memory, says Gawronski, even if it was never explicitly said the two were linked.
 
However, it is possible for a person to reflectively change their impulsive responses. In short, we can teach ourselves not to react in an inappropriate way.
 
“Affirming something different or new is more helpful in overcoming these mental associations that are responsible for our immediate affective responses, as compared to negating the contents that have produced these reactions in the first place,” he says. For example, many people show favourable responses when they think of former NBA basketball player Michael Jordan as an athlete, but they show negative responses when they think of him in terms of his ethnicity, Gawronski says.
 
Gawronski is examining ways to change people’s impulsive responses to mental illness, apply his method to the treatment of phobias and change a person’s eating habits by conditioning different food associations with positive or negative behavioural responses.
 
“If we can give them advice how they can change their positive response towards chocolate or how they could change their negative impulsive response towards the spider, that’s obviously more helpful than just saying the spider is not really harmful,” he says.
 
The bottom line for Gawronski is that the gut reactions of humans need not be set in stone. With a little work, almost anyone can perform a behaviour makeover. 

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