Stereotype-Consistent Information Increase Thought-Confidence and Leads to More Extreme Judgments

Clark et al. demonstrated one mechanism by which their participants came to have more confidence in stereotype-consistent thoughts.  Participants with greater confidence in these thoughts were more likely to use them when making judgments.  Specifically, Clark et al. examined the association of higher socioeconomic status with higher standardized test performance and lower socioeconomic status with lower performance in elementary school.  In two experiments, Clark et al. first randomly assigned participants to view the-in fact fictitious-test results of a child getting either 90% or 20% of the answers correct.   In both experiments, they then randomly assigned participants a biography indicating the child’s either higher or lower socioeconomic status.  In both experiments, Clark et al. asked participants to rate their confidence in their thoughts about the child and to recommend that the child be placed in either a gifted or a remedial program. 

Participants in the first experiment, which followed the procedure described above, tended to have more confidence in their thoughts when they learned that the higher performing child was also from a family with higher socioeconomic status or when they learned that the lower performing child was from a family with lower socioeconomic status.  Those participants also tended to makes stronger recommendations for the child’s academic future than participants who were presented with a high-performing student from a lower socioeconomic status family or vice-versa.  Clark et al.’s participants’ degree of thought confidence mediated the relationship between the stereotype consistency of the information and the extremity of their judgments.  A mediating variable is a variable that helps, in statistical analysis, to account for the relationship between two other variables.  In other words, participants with greater thought confidence because they were presented with stereotype consistent information also tended to make more extreme recommendations. 

In the second experiment, some participants were randomly assigned a distraction condition.  In this condition, they were forced to carry out an additional task while reading and evaluating information about the-in fact fictitious-child.  When participants were distracted, participants were less accurate when recalling the child’s test scores.  They tended to recall the scores of a low-performing higher socioeconomic status child as being better than that child’s actual scores and they tended to recall the scores of a high-performing lower socioeconomic status child as being worst than that child’s actual scores.  Participants under the distraction condition reported less confidence in their thoughts about the child than did participants who were not distracted. Participants that were distracted by an additional task also made weaker recommendations regarding the child’s academic future as well.  However, they were more biased by socioeconomic status.  This relationship was mediated by their biased recall of the child’s test scores.  In other words, participants under distraction conditions tended to believe that children from lower socioeconomic status families or higher socioeconomic status families scored poorly or well respectively and this belief helps, in statistical analysis, to explain the fact that participants tended to recommend lower socioeconomic status students for remedial programs and higher socioeconomic status students for gifted programs.