The Cognitive Mechanism Of Ethnic Stereotype

Stereotype refers to the general attitude which stably formed towards a human group, and it is a kind of cognitive schema that contains a perceiver's knowledge, beliefs, and expectancies about this social group. Additionally the ethnic stereotype is regarded as the traits' generalization to the ethnic group. The present study mainly focus on the ethnic stereotypes of Han Chinese college students, and gave an investigation to their cognitive mechanism.The Experiment 1, which based on the prototype theory of stereotyping, investigated the existence of the ethnic stereotype. In this experiment, the words association of "name-trait" was applied as stimuli, and a classic false memory paradigm as "learning-reorganization" was used. Finally, the participants' reaction times showed difference effects according to different stimuli; further conformed the ethnic stereotypes were indeed existed.To give a further inspection to the mechanism of the ethnic stereotypes, Experiment 2, which designed according to the Four-Stage-Processing Model, used a paradigm changing from the priming paradigm. In this experiment, names take a role as priming stimulus to prime the twice judgment towards traits. The reaction times revealed that, the affect moderated the implicit activation of stereotypes, while had little impact on the explicit stereotype application processes.In order to give a farther explore to the neural-cognitive mechanism of explicit and implicit processes of ethnic stereotypes, the event-related potentials (ERPs) technique was involved in experiment 3. Both the behavior date and the electrophysiological data indicated that the implicit stereotype activation processes, comparing to the explicit stereotype application processes, have different brain mechanisms. The result showed:(1) P2, N2 and LPC, which appeared in the frontal electrode points, have an important relationship with ethnic stereotypes. P2 and N2 would reflect the implicit categorization process to the stereotypic incongruent and congruent information in stereotype activation, while the LPC, appeared in 400-550ms, might reflect the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC)'s cognitive control to the stereotypic incongruent information. (2) But for the explicit process of ethic stereotype application, the P2 and P300 which appeared in the in the central electrode points may have an intense relationship with it.These results, together with other evidences, demonstrated that the ethnic stereotype was indeed in existence, and it should be a complex categorization process to social information...