Central questions about stereotyping and prejudice are the extent to which they occur without a person’s awareness or intent, and the extent to which they can or cannot be controlled. Do we exhibit subtle prejudicial behavior of which we are not aware? Where do we get these biases? How and when are we able to overcome them? In our research, we examine the ways in which automatic and controlled processes interact with and constrain one another to produce stereotyping and prejudice. Current work is focusing on how these processes contribute to stereotype/prejudice development and change, the inhibition of stereotyping and prejudice, and stereotypic biases in memory, particularly as they relate to failures in eyewitness testimony. Other research is examining the interaction of automatic and controlled processes in a broader context of self-regulation that includes addictive behavior, phobias, aggression, emotion and judgment, etc. One tool we use in this research is the Quad Model of automatic and controlled processing. The model is a multinomial model that separates the automatic and controlled components of behavior from performance on a single task (see below). In other research, we are using tools of cognitive neuroscience to understand the automatic and controlled components of social behavior. We are using both event-related potentials (ERPs) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine these questions.
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In other research, we examine the ways in which stereotypes and prejudices influence the impressions we form of other people. We are interested in how these beliefs affect the things we notice about another person, how we interpret their behavior, how we make judgments about them, and what we remember about them.
Much of this research also has been concerned with the efficient nature of stereotyping. One thing we know about stereotypes is that people tend to rely on them to a greater extent when their processing resources are depleted. Whether due to tiredness, task difficulty, or anxiety, situations that decrease the availability of processing capacity increase the use of stereotypes. We are interested in how this functional aspect of stereotyping influences the way we attend to, understand, judge, and remember other people.
A third area of research is concerned with understanding the mental representation of stereotypes and other social knowledge. Exactly what types of knowledge are activated in memory when we use a stereotype (or make judgments about another person or ourselves)? We are particularly interested in the extent to which stereotypes about a group are based on knowledge of particular group members' behavior or are based on abstract knowledge about what the group is like as a whole. This research has important connections to our work on stereotype efficiency. The factors that make stereotype use efficient also influence the manner in which other people’s behavior is represented in memory. In turn, these representational differences have important implications for how stereotypes may be changed.
Despite their efficient use, there are many situations in which we would rather not be influenced by our stereotypes. For both personal and social reasons, we often feel the need to avoid stereotypic thought. But how successful are these attempts? Recent research suggests that it is not so easy to suppress unwanted thoughts. Ironically, by focusing on these unwanted thoughts, we actually increase their mental accessibility. As a result, unwanted thoughts often "rebound," having greater influence than if we had never tried to suppress them.
Much of our research in this area has attempted to identify the conditions under which people will spontaneously engage in stereotype suppression and the conditions under which that suppression will and will not have these unwanted consequences. More recent endeavors have focused more on individuation as a means to avoid stereotypic responding. When we individuate, our impressions are based on the whole array of information that we have about another person, rather than simple group membership. We have been examining how intrinsic motivations to avoid prejudice encourage a variety of different kinds of individuating behaviors relating to attention (which attributes/behaviors of another person capture our attention), attributional processes (how do we explain others' behavior), and memory processes.