Effects of moral stereotypes on the formation and persistence of group preferences

Abstract

Do stereotypes have a stronger and more persistent effect on impressions when they are moral in tone? In two experiments (N = 187), participants interacted with members of two groups in an interactive social decision game, modeled on a reward reinforcement task, in which they formed impressions of players based on their feedback. Prior to the task, participants were exposed to positive or negative group stereotypes that were moral or nonmoral in content. Although players from each group were, on average, equally likely to provide reward feedback, participants formed behavioral choice preferences for players from positively-stereotyped groups over negatively-stereotyped groups. Importantly, this effect was moderated by the moral content of the stereotypes: in the moral stereotype condition, participants formed more extreme initial expectancies for players' feedback and showed more resistance to updating in response to stereotype-disconfirming feedback, whereas in the nonmoral stereotype condition, initial expectancies were weaker and preferences were updated over time to match players' actual feedback. Study 2 replicated this effect and additionally showed that moral stereotypes generalize more strongly to impressions of novel group members compared with nonmoral stereotypes. Computational modeling suggests this moral stereotype effect is due to extreme initial expectancies combined with group-based updating of member impressions. Together, these studies demonstrate that moral stereotypes have a stronger influence on person impressions than nonmoral stereotypes, and that they do so by inducing stronger expectancies for a group member's behavior while impairing individuated updating.