Impacts of implicit normative evaluations on stereotyping and prejudice

Abstract

The present research examined how other people’s evaluations towards social groups will develop and how these evaluations will affect discriminatory behaviour outside of conscious effort. By living in a society people are exposed to other people’s preferences or beliefs and these culturally shared preferences or beliefs can become automatic over time. I call this construct implicit normative evaluations. In the first series of studies I developed and validated implicit normative evaluations measures. Study 2 demonstrated that implicit normative evaluations would develop by exposure to cultural norms. Study 3 showed that those who were exposed to an audience who laughed at offensive racist jokes were more likely to have negative implicit normative evaluation towards a target group and were more likely to engage in discriminatory behaviour than those who were exposed to an audience who did not laugh at the racist jokes. Finally in Study 4, I examined the consequences of implicit normative evaluations towards Black people and found that implicit normative evaluations played a role in the shooter bias. The implications of implicit normative evaluations in developing potential interventions for prejudice reduction will be discussed.