Stereotypes: Lorella Lepore And Rupert Brown

Lorella Lepore and Rupert Brown (1997) argued that automatic stereotyping does not apply to everyone and is therefore not inevitable. To prove this, Lepore and Brown conducted three studies to demonstrate that stereotyping and prejudice is somewhat flexible. Study 1 was conducted to differentiate between high- and low-prejudice people by examining their knowledge of cultural stereotypes. Lepore and Brown hypothesized that knowledge of cultural stereotypes is universal. The subjects were 40 White British undergraduate students. Participants were to list words and images they knew of West Indians. Participants then listed stereotypes of West Indians and filled out a prejudice scale. The subjects’ responses split them into two groups: high and low-prejudice people. The results of this study matched previous studies showing that high- and low- prejudice …show more content…
The subjects were 51 undergraduate university students and an additional 12 participants for the recognition condition. The participants were primed by flashing 13 words related to Black people. For the no-prime condition, no real words were used as primes and were masked right after. Subjects then read sentences about an unknown person and rated this person positively or negative stereotypic on a number of prejudice trait scales. Those in the recognition condition had to select one of three words that they thought was flashed to them in the priming session. As predicted, the results of this study showed that high-prejudice participants rated the target person negatively and decreased their positive constructs and low-prejudice participants rated the target person with positive stereotypic components. In addition, high-prejudice participants’ ratings on the positive scales were lower in the prime condition than in the no-prime