The Relationship Between Positive and Negative Features of Stereotypes

Abstract

An experiment was conducted to directly test the cognitive link between positive and negative features of stereotypes. Participants were primed with either male or female faces and with positive or negative trait adjectives that were either stereotypic of women or gender-neutral. Response latencies to word/non-word judgments in a lexical decision task were compared. It was predicted that participants for whom the category male was accessible would demonstrate facilitated responses to congruently valenced prime-target pairs regardless of the prime's stereotypy. For those whom the category female was made salient, however, it was predicted that affective priming effects would be less pronounced when the prime word was also stereotypic of women. Results found inconsistent affective priming effects and no significant interaction between gender primes and stimuli characteristics.