Friday, April 29, 2011

Cognitive Constraints: Stereotyping Increased and Decreases Persuasion Even For Stereotype-Irrelevant Messaging

Messages attributed to stigmatized sources—here defined as members of out-groups that, historically, have been the targets of prejudice—have different persuasive outcomes than those attributed to non-stigmatized sources (Mackie, Worth, and Asuncion, 1990, Petty, Fleming, & White 1999, 2005, Livingston & Sinclair 2008). These outcomes have real-world consequences for politics, juror responses, and decision-making dynamics in the workplace. When judging legal cases (Sargent & Bradfield, 2004) or when considering a coworker’s contribution to workforce planning (De Dreu & West, 2001), even individuals who report being low-prejudiced will treat a message attributed to a stigmatized source differently from a message attributed to an in-group source. In some cases, the message recipient may think more about the message and take its content more seriously when it is attributed to a stigmatized source (Petty, Fleming, & White 1999, 2005). In other cases, however, the message recipient may, knowingly or not, ignore or counter-argue that message (Mackie, Worth, & Asuncion, 1990). Individual belief about personal level of prejudice, then, is an insufficient predictor of prejudiced behaviors.

Persuasion researchers have not yet directly examined potential moderating effects of motivation to act without prejudice on the processing of a message attributed to a stigmatized source. Researchers have, however, examined the different moderating effects of levels of explicit prejudice and, very recently, different moderating effects of implicit and explicit prejudice on the processing of these messages (Petty & Brinol 2009, Petty, Brinol, & Johnson 2010). Level of prejudice influences the extent to which an individual is motivated to think about and respond to the message, with lower-prejudiced individuals often being more motivated to process a message attributed to a stigmatized versus a non-stigmatized source (Petty, Fleming, & White, 1999, 2005). However, this effect varies by the personal relevancy of the message and the degree to which it is counterattitudinal (Livingston & Sinclair, 2008). When a message is both relevant and threatening, even a low-prejudiced recipient may reject the arguments of a stigmatized versus a non-stigmatized source.

Plant and Devine’s Internal Motivation to Respond Without Prejudice Scale (IMS) and External Motivation to Respond Without Prejudice Scale (EMS) (Plant and Devine, 1998) are well-established and versatile measures of motivations to act without prejudice (Butz & Plant, 2009). Correlated differently with implicit and explicit prejudices (Devine, Amodio, Harmon-Jones, & Vance, 2002) as well as different self-regulation strategies (Legault, Green-Demers, Grant, & Chung, 2007), these measures are powerful indicators of implicit and explicit prejudiced attitudes and of different responses to these attitudes. No research to date has directly tested whether IMS and EMS levels moderate processing of a message attributed to a stigmatized source, despite the fact that existing research on these scales may imply a number of moderating effects.

Current research illustrates several ways in which a stigmatized message source can affect message processing. For example, Livingston and Sinclair (2008) found that European Canadian research participants derogated the source of a threatening message more if that source was a member of a stigmatized out-group, in this case an Aboriginal Canadian. In that study, European Canadian students listened to a message in favor of the implementation of senior comprehensive exams at their university. These exams would be implemented prior to graduation and this message, for some students, was highly threatening.

When an Aboriginal Canadian speaker delivered the message, participants derogated the source and his message, expressing less confidence in his “competency, professionalism, intelligence, and overall impression” (Livingston and Sinclair 2008). When a European Canadian speaker delivered the message, neither the source nor the message were as negatively evaluated and attitudes were comparatively more favorable toward the senior comprehensive exam policy. When the message was not personally relevant to the students, the proposed exams were to be implemented at another university, this derogation did not take place. This derogation of the source and message, then, occurred only when the message was threatening. Surprisingly, both European Canadians who reported being low in prejudice towards Aboriginals and European Canadians who reported being higher in prejudice towards Aboriginals derogated the Aboriginal source.

Other, potentially contradictory, studies have shown that low-prejudiced individuals actively avoid prejudiced behaviors. Petty, Fleming, and White’s Watchdog Hypothesis argues that low-prejudiced individuals understand that they and others may have prejudiced reactions and will thus think more about the message in order to guard against letting these prejudices influence their behavior (Petty, Fleming, and White 1995, 2005). In their studies, Fleming, Petty, and White have shown that low-prejudiced individuals think more about messages when they are attributed to a black or homosexual stigmatized source. They presented white, heterosexual research participants with either strong or weak messages in favor of senior comprehensive exams. Unlike in Livingston and Sinclair’s study, however, the personal relevancy of these messages was left ambiguous. Petty, Fleming, and White found that low-prejudiced individuals thought more about the message than did high-prejudiced individuals. If low-prejudiced participants were presented a strong message, their thoughts in response to the message were more positive and they were ultimately more persuaded by the message. If they were presented a weak message, their thoughts were more negative and they were not persuaded. Higher-prejudiced individuals had less polarized reactions to the message, regardless of whether it was strong or weak, suggesting that they lacked motivation to think carefully about the message. In subsequent research, they demonstrated that a message about an African American target lead to a similar pattern of responses among low-prejudiced individuals.

When Petty, Fleming, and White’s research participants generated topic-relevant thoughts in response to message, they elaborated that message. Elaboration, as defined by Petty and Cacioppo (Petty, Cacioppo, Strathman, and Priester 2005), is a state in which individuals are motivated and able to pay attention to a message, responding to its arguments, and integrating it into their own attitudes. According to the Elaboration Likelihood Model of persuasion (ELM), if individuals elaborate the message and then accept or reject the arguments of the message, this new attitude towards the message will be more stable and lasting than if the reasons for rejection or acceptance are heuristic. Heuristics are rules of thumb, such as the expertise of a source, shared group membership with a source, and even the length of a message, which are characteristic of message-processing when an individual is low in motivation or ability.

The lines of research discussed suggest that personal relevancy, group identity, the Watchdog effect, and personal threat can all play separate roles in the persuasive context. The effects of each variable are not, however, clear. In the Livingston and Sinclair study, individuals may have elaborated the message because it was personally relevant and then derogated the source and the message in order to avoid a threatening situation. Interestingly, source derogation was minimized when accuracy goals were introduced, although criticisms of the message remained unchanged (Livingston and Sinclair 2008). In Petty, Fleming, and White’s work (1999, 2005), individuals actively elaborated messages of ambiguous personal relevance attributed to stigmatized sources with the presumed goal of objective processing. If similar motivations were shared by Livingston and Sinclair’s low-prejudiced participants, these participants obviously failed to effectively pursue their egalitarian goals.

Both Livingston and Sinclair (2008) and Petty, White, and Fleming (1999, 2005) examine self-reported, explicit, prejudiced attitudes. All prejudiced attitudes can be defined as associations between an attitude object—in this case an out-group member, an out-group, or a defining feature of the out-group—and a negative evaluation. Individuals could negatively evaluate an African American based on her group membership, negatively evaluate the entire category of African American, or have a reaction to a specific feature associated with that category, such as dark-skin color. All evaluations, prejudiced or non-prejudiced, can be described as valenced—positive or negative—and prejudiced attitudes include, by definition, negative evaluations.

Even when an individual does not explicitly endorse prejudiced attitudes if they are culturally common then she is still likely to be aware of them (Plant and Devine, 1998). Repeated exposure to these prejudiced attitudes in the social environment can make the attitudes highly accessible, leading to, at minimum, automatic prejudiced associations. These associations are known as implicit attitudes. The existing literature is unclear as to whether implicit attitudes can operate unconsciously, at a level inaccessible to individual awareness (Petty and Brinol, 2010, Fazio and Olson, 2003, Gawronski, Hoffman, and Wilbur, 2006). However, it is generally agreed that individuals have both imperfect awareness of these attitudes and motivations not to express these attitudes and that self-report measures may differ consistently from other measures (Hoffman, Gschwender, Nosek and Schmitt, 2005, Hoffman, Gschwender, and Schmitt, 2005).

Neither Livingston and Sinclair or Petty, White, and Fleming measure implicit prejudice. Implicit attitudes can be measured in numerous ways. Some measures include observing decision-making under time-pressure or cognitive load, subliminally priming an individual with an attitude-relevant word, such as African American, and recording prime-activated behaviors, or having participants take the Implicit Attitude Test, which measures the speed with which individuals can categorize positive or negative words with certain attitude objects (Fazio and Olson, 2003). Tasks include categorizing positive or negative words into categories associated by word or image with an out-group (Fazio and Olson, 2003).

Both implicit and explicit prejudice, it has been recently demonstrated, moderate the persuasive power of messages by or about stigmatized persons (Petty, Brinol, and Johnson, 2010). Petty, Brinol and Fleming (Petty and Brinol, 2009) demonstrated that participants that were low in both explicit and implicit prejudice elaborated a message about an African American person more than those who were high in explicit and implicit prejudice. They further demonstrated that individuals high in implicit prejudice and low in explicit prejudice, or vice versa, elaborated messages even more than individuals that scored low on both types of measure.

Petty, Brinol, and Johnson (2010), in a manuscript in press, have demonstrated that discrepancies between a message recipient’s implicit and explicit attitudes are positively correlated with elaboration. They tested the watchdog effects influence on the processing of a message attributed to a stigmatized source by presenting recipients with either a strong or weak message advocating the use of phosphate detergents and attributing that message to either a White or Black source. They then examined the moderating effect of discrepancy between implicit and explicit prejudice—which they term implicit ambivalence—on whether message recipients elaborated the message. Petty and colleagues found that message recipients elaborated more as this discrepancy increased.

Interestingly, some participants were low in implicit and high in explicit prejudices. It is possible that these participants were prejudiced for ideological reasons and that these reasons were not positively correlated to prejudiced associations. When elaboration was analyzed, however, these participants were indistinguishable from participants with high levels of implicit and low levels of explicit prejudice. This suggests that ambivalence itself moderates elaboration. Research suggests that implicit ambivalence is positively correlated to discomfort, and that discomfort may motivate increased need to resolve ambivalence through greater processing (Petty and Brinol, 2009, Rydell and Mackie, 2008). Elaboration, then, may be motivated by the need to resolve discomfort, not by the direct pursuit of egalitarian goals.