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  • The know and unknow of social facilitation on stereotyping
    Publication . Figueira, Pedro Miguel Regueiras; Garcia-Marques, Teresa; Sherman, Jeff
    Since Triplett (1898), that experimental psychology has explored how the presence of others (vs being alone) affects our behavior and mind. This effect is nowadays known as Social Facilitation. Although, many advances have been made in this area, little is known about how Social Facilitation affects stereotyping. As such, this thesis investigates how the presence of other persons (vs being alone) affects our stereotyping and its mechanisms. Until the present date, only two papers have addressed this theme reaching opposite conclusions. While Lambert, et al. (2003) suggest more stereotyping in the presence of others, Castelli and Tomelleri (2008) suggest less stereotyping in the presence of others. To approach this incongruency in the literature, we conceptually replicated the main experiment of each of these papers. Our results did not replicate any of those papers. We did not find a clear Social Facilitation effect over stereotyping when following Lambert, et al’s. (2003) methodology. Moreover, when replicating Castelli and Tomelleri (2008), we found evidence of a Social Facilitation effect over stereotyping, but now in the opposite direction of the original study, showing more stereotyping in presence of others. Throughout this thesis, we developed studies and carefully analyzed the results aiming for better understanding the effects. Since data suggested that the evidence could be spread over reaction times (RTs) or error rates, we analyzed our data (and data from a new experiment) by using the Diffusion Model. This technique allows assembling RTs and accuracy data into a set of parameters. This analysis was highly fruitful adding relevant information for future empirical approaches to stereotyping effects in the presence and isolation from others. First, Social Facilitation effects over stereotyping occur, because those in presence of others have higher stereotyping than those in isolation. Second, as already stated in the Social Facilitation literature, the type of Social Condition matters. Because we operationalized social presence as co-action and isolation having no presence of the experimenter, results diverge from the original studies. Third, Social Facilitation effects over stereotyping depend on the type the task used to measure stereotyping. These effects were more subtle in the Weapon Identification Task (WIT; Payne, 2001) and clearer in the race Implicit Association Task (IAT; Greenwald, McGhee & Schwartz, 1998). We argue that this occurs because Social Facilitation effects occur through a mechanism that is differently represented in those tasks. Fourth, our isolation condition challenges the typical results obtained in the WIT. As such our data is interpreted as evidence that different social conditions can lead people to cope differently with this task. Moreover, our data in general shows evidence of more stereotype bias and less control over stereotype activation in presence of others. We interpret this data as corroborating evidence of previous claims that the presence of others creates an overload context (Baron, 1986) and that it somehow reduces our capability of exerting an efficient control mechanism (Wagstaff, et al., 2008).
    2020-05-29Doctoral thesis Open access Show more