ABSTRACT
The research presented in this chapter addresses important theoretical and methodological concerns regarding the propensity to use and act upon stereotypes within social perception. Traditionally, research has demonstrated that social perceivers, almost without fail, categorize people into domains such as “race” and “gender,” and then apply stereotypes to those people (e.g., “All men are aggressive”). While stereotyping is an efficient mechanism to determine how to act around novel people (e.g., people you have never met before), the research surrounding it has generally painted the social perceiver as uncontrollably racist and sexist. We argue that this perspective may be overstated and is due largely to an over-reliance on “one shot” studies. Thus, we propose that social psychologists should explore the effects of social perception as it occurs over time. This contention requires minimal changes to the traditional social–cognitive methodology. In our studies, participants are required to learn information about various social targets and are then tested on that information over the course of a few days. Here, we will show how naturally occurring processes—primarily memory consolidation and sleep—promote one’s ability to integrate and access recently learned personal information about social targets which in turn reduces our propensity to stereotype those social targets. Rather than measuring neural indicators of memory consolidation, which is not particularly feasible, in this chapter we present a line of work where we manipulate the time between tests to measure the physiological process that we propose underlies our effects. As such, this chapter presents a cost-effective way of studying psychophysiological processes, without needing imaging tools to test more directly the distinct pathways that consolidated versus non-consolidated memories use to produce coherent social representations.
