Experimental Study, The Selective Processing Of The Stereotypes Of Outer Groups

Stereotype is one of the main content of psychology, especially in social cognition .The social cognition psychology point out that stereotype is a kind of general stable viewpoint toward a certain social group, it usually relates to race, area, sex, occupation and age. From the 1920s, social psychologists researched more about the conception and the generation of stereotype, all of the research got quite of achievement .Since the 1980s, many scholars began to research the implicit stereotype, which promoted stereotype research extremely. At the same time, more and more discussed about the selective processing of stereotype, which formed a lot of different theories. But all the researches haven't referred cognitive resource.The goal of the present research was to investigate whether the different nature of in-group and out-group stereotypes is reflected in different selective processing of in-group and out-group information. In addition to selective processing, response bias due to stereotype was studied.Experiment 1 adopted 2(cognitive resources: high vs. low)×2(participant gender: male vs. female)×4(information type: in-group consistent vs. in-group inconsistent vs. out-group consistent vs. out-group inconsistent) mixed design,"cognitive resource"and"participant gender"as between subject variable ,"information type"as within subject variable, hit rate was dependent variable. Experiment 2 adopted 2(cognitive resources: high vs. low)×2(participant gender: male vs. female)×4(information type: in-group negative vs. in-group positive vs. out-group negative vs. out-group positive) mixed design,"cognitive resource"and"participant gender"as between subject variable ,"information type"as within subject variable, hit rate was dependent variable.The following conclusions were drawn from this research:1. People in different cognitive resources did have different selective processing about in-group and out-group stereotype. With the low cognitive resource, people will preferentially encode consistent information when processing out-group information, whereas the reverse pattern will hold when people process in-group information. With enough cognitive resources, people process in-group and out-group consistent-inconsistent information don't have significantly different.2. With different cognitive resources, people's selective bias is different. When low cognitive resource, people will preferentially encode in-group positive information, whereas the reverse pattern will hold when people process out-group information. With enough cognitive resources, people process in-group and out-group negative-positive information don't have significantly different.