ABSTRACT
Prejudice has traditionally been conceptualized as negative attitudes toward members of an outgroup that are based on stereotypes and beliefs concerning that outgroup. Traditional measures of prejudice tend to reflect this conceptualization in that they assess individuals’ explicit attitudes toward outgroup members, or issues pertaining to outgroup members. That is, prejudice has largely been measured in terms of what people think about an outgroup. We have proposed that what people think about a particular group may often differ from how they think about it (von Hippel, Sekaquaptewa, & Vargas, 1995, 1997). For example, a person maybe unwilling to entertain prejudiced explicit attitudes toward a particular group, yet those attitudes may nevertheless influence information processing about individual group members (e.g., White & Harkins, 1995). Thus, measures of how people think about outgroup members might fruitfully assess the stereotypic biases that people show when they process information about these groups. Furthermore, these biases in information processing have the potential to influence both cognitive and behavioral responses to outgroup members.
