1. Stereotype Activation, Application, and Inhibition

The central theme of most of our work concerns the determinants and mechanisms of stereotypic influences on social perception, judgment, behavior, and memory.  We are interested in understanding how the stereotypes we hold of various social groups influence (often in very subtle ways) how we think about, evaluate, and treat members of these groups.  Among the questions that we have researched:  (1) When do stereotypes get activated in our minds?  Do they always come to mind when we meet members of stigmatized groups?  (2) Once activated, how are stereotypes used in guiding attention, inference, and judgment?  (3) To what extent can people control the processes of stereotype activation and application?  If people want to avoid being prejudiced, how can they succeed?

2.  Emotion, Arousal, and Social Perception

The question of how emotion and intellect interact is of longstanding interest, and we have been particularly interested in the question of how emotional states and feelings of arousal relate to processes of social perception.    Do we perceive people differently when we are angry versus happy versus sad?    Our work indicates that some feeling states seem to be associated with a greater propensity to judge others superficially, on the basis of their group membership or apparent credibility.  Included on the list of states associated with this tendency are happiness, anger, and the very low-arousal states associated with non-optimal times of day (e.g., early morning for a "night owl").  Transitory sadness, however, shows no such pattern.  Other work on emotion and social perception has examined the ways that we perceive and respond to the emotional states of our relationship partners.

3.  Context Dependency of Social Cognition

To what extent are our general beliefs about a social group influenced by specific, individual group members whom we have recently encountered?    For example, does watching the Cosby Show on TV, and seeing the positive images of African Americans portrayed there, have an impact on subsequently reported beliefs about African Americans in general?  If so, what kind of effect does it have?   We have pursued a number of investigations designed to show that exemplars play a crucial role in social cognition, and that our judgments of the social world depend in part on the particular exemplars that happen to be salient in the judgmental context.   Exemplar activation occurs automatically in the presence of strong retrieval cues.   In addition to specific exemplars, the general schemas that are activated in a particular judgment context are likely to have a pronounced influence on social cognition. 

4.  Social Memory

To function effectively in the social world, we need to have an extensive knowledge base about what particular people, groups, and events are like.  Of the vast amount of information that registers on our sensory organs, what determines which pieces will be stored away in memory for later retrieval?  How accurate are our memorial representations?  What specific kinds of memory distortions are likely to occur?  Can we hold an event in memory with great conviction when, in reality, it never occurred?  Our examinations of social memory processes have attempted to shed light on these kinds of issues.