Question

Identify why stereotypes are difficult to change. Describe Devine’s two-step model of cognitive processing as it relates to stereotypes and prejudice

Answer 1

Answer.

Stereotypes refer to Cognitive or schematic representation of inviduals based on their group membership. It is found that  absense of first hand experience with membership of a particular group increase one’s reliance on certain preconceived notions and beliefs about a particular group. In our everyday life, we often rely on the social norms, behaviour and thoughts of experts, role models, influential agents like media to determine our own ideas and beliefs about members of an out group. Thus, stereotypes such as those about a particular coloured ethnic group a society being generally aggressive or unintelligent without considering unique or individual cases, are resilient to change despite contrary evidence as they offer a heuristic strategy for categorising and evaluating the world. Moroever, it is seen that stereotypes are consolidated in memory so that there is Better encoding and recall of stereotype-consistent information which makes them less amenable to change and forgetting. According to the encoding flexibility model, the activation of a stereotype leads to the expected material to be processed in a conceptually fluent manner, even when attentional capacity is low, and spare processing is then directed to unexpected material.

Furthermore, even if one encounters contrary evidence, the bookkeeping hypothesis asserts that one may Obtain new information, and then update beliefs such that one is prone to explain away inconsistencies as "special circumstances". Thus, differences within a group is attributed to exceptions rather than a sign of heterogeneity of the outgroup.

However, Devine argued against the inevitability of stereotypes and he proposed a two step cognitive processing approach to reduce the strength of a stereotype. In the model, The first step is that of an Automatic process which brings up information pertaining to the stereotypes. high- and low-prejudice persons are equally prone to upholding the cultural stereotype. The model suggests that the stereotype is automatically activated in the presence of a member of the stereotype group.

However, when an information is processed at the second level, that of controlled processing, then there is a greater possibility for low prejudice responses as individuals are able to consciously refute or inhibit the automatically activated stereotype. The controlled processing of an information can help to alleviate the previously held stereotype.