Jeff Sherman

Associate Professor
Department of Psychology
Northwestern University
Phone: (847) 467-4133
Email:  sherm@northwestern.edu

Research Interests:

Social cognition; stereotyping, impression formation, self-perception.

Life Interests:

Travel (especially to Pacific Mexico!), scuba diving, Indiana Hoosier basketball.   I am a drummer and used to play in a band called Cinderblock that released 1 disc on Restless records. We were heavily influenced by the Replacements and early Dinosaur Jr.

Current Research

One thing we know about stereotypes is that people tend to rely on them to a greater extent when their processing resources are depleted. Whether due to tiredness, task difficulty, anxiety, or positive moods, situations that decrease the availability of processing capacity increase the use of stereotypes. In this line of work, we are examining exactly how stereotypes make people more efficient in these situations. Our research suggests that stereotypes promote efficiency, in part, by allowing for the flexible encoding, representation, and retrieval of different aspects of stereotype-consistent and -inconsistent information when resources are low.

Relevant Publications:
Bodenhausen, G. V., Macrae, C. N., & Sherman, J. W. (in press). On the dialectics of discrimination: Dual processes in social stereotyping. To appear in S. Chaiken & Y. Trope (Eds.), Dual process theories in social psychology. New York: Guilford Press.
Sherman, J. W. (in press). The dynamic relationship between stereotype efficiency and mental representation. To appear in G. Moskowitz (Ed.), Future directions in social cognition. Hillsdale, NJ:   Erlbaum.
Sherman, J. W., & Bessenoff, G. R. (1999). Stereotypes as source monitoring cues: On the interaction between episodic and semantic memory. Psychological Science, 10, 106-110.
Sherman, J. W., & Frost, L. A. (2000).  On the encoding of stereotype-relevant information under cognitive load. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 26, 26-34.
Sherman, J. W., Lee, A. Y., Bessenoff, G. R., & Frost, L. A. (1998). Stereotype efficiency reconsidered: Encoding flexibility under cognitive load. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 589-606.                
Sherman, J. W., Macrae, C. N., & Bodenhausen, G. V. (in press).   Attention and stereotyping: Cognitive constraints on the construction of meaningful social impressions.  European Review of Social Psychology. 

A second area of research is concerned with understanding the mental representation of stereotypes and other social knowledge. Exactly what gets activated in memory when we use a stereotype (or make judgments about  another person or ourselves)? We are particularly interested in the extent to which stereotypes about a group are based on knowledge of particular group members' behavior or are based on abstract knowledge about what the group is like as a whole. This research has important connections to our work on stereotype efficiency. The factors that make stereotype use efficient also influence the manner in which stereotypic and counter-stereotypic information are represented in memory. In turn, these representational differences have important implications for how stereotypes may be changed.

Relevant Publications:
Hamilton, D. L., & Sherman, J. W. (1994). Stereotypes. In R. S. Wyer, Jr., & T. K. Srull (Eds.), Handbook of Social Cognition (2nd Ed., Vol. 2, pp. 1-68). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Klein, S. B., Babey, S. H., & Sherman, J. W. (1997). The functional independence of trait and behavioral self-knowledge: Methodological considerations and new empirical findings. Social Cognition, 15, 183-203.
Klein, S. B., Loftus, J., & Sherman, J. W. (1993). The role of summary and specific behavioral memories in trait judgments about the self. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 19, 305-311.
Klein, S. B., Sherman, J. W., & Loftus, J. (1996). The role of episodic and semantic memory in the development of trait self-knowledge. Social Cognition, 14, 277-291.
Mackie, D. M., Sherman, J. W., & Worth, L. T. (1993). On-line and memory-based processes in group variability judgments. Social Cognition, 11, 44-69.
Sherman, J. W. (1996). Development and mental representation of stereotypes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70, 1126-1141.
Sherman, J. W., & Klein, S. B. (1994). The development and representation of personality impressions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67, 972-983.
Sherman, J. W., Klein, S. B., Laskey, A., & Wyer, N. A. (1998). Intergroup bias in group judgment processes: The role of behavioral memories. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 34, 51-65.

Despite their usefulness, there are many situations in which we would rather not be influenced by our stereotypes. For both personal and social reasons, we often feel the need to avoid stereotypic thought. But how successful are these attempts? Recent research suggests that it is not so easy to suppress unwanted thoughts. Ironically, by constantly focusing on these unwanted thoughts, we actually increase their mental accessibility. As a result, unwanted thoughts often "rebound" on us, having greater influence than if we had never tried to suppress them. Much of our research in this area has attempted to identify the conditions under which people will spontaneously engage in stereotype suppression and the conditions under which that suppression will and will not have these unwanted consequences.  More recent endeavors have focused more on individuation as a means to avoid stereotypic responding.  When we individuate, our impressions are based on the whole array of information that we have about another person, rather than simple group membership.  We have been examining how intrinsic motivations to avoid prejudice encourage a variety of different kinds of individuating behaviors relating to attention (which attributes/behaviors of another person capture our attention), attributional processes (how do we explain others' behavior), and memory processes.

Full Curriculum Vitae

Last Updated: August 17, 2000