Stereotypes Disrupt Probabilistic Category Learning

Racial stereotypes exert pernicious effects on decision-making and behavior, yet little is known about how stereotypes disrupt people's ability to learn new associations. The current research interrogates a fundamental question about the boundary conditions of probabilistic learning by examining whether and how learning is influenced by preexisting associations. Across three experiments, participants learned the probabilistic outcomes of different card combinations based on feedback in either a social (e.g., forecasting crime) or nonsocial (e.g., forecasting weather) learning context. During learning, participants were presented with either task-irrelevant social (i.e., Black or White faces) or nonsocial (i.e., darker or lighter clouds) stimuli that were stereotypically congruent or incongruent with the learning context. Participants exhibited learning disruptions in the social compared to nonsocial learning context, despite repeated instructions that the stimuli were unrelated to the outcome (Studies 1 and 2). We also found no differences in learning disruptions when participants learned in the presence of negatively (Black and criminal) or positively valenced stereotypes (Black and athletic; Study 3). Finally, we tested whether learning decrements were due to "first-order " stereotype application or inhibition at the trial level, or due to "second-order " cognitive load disruptions that accumulate across trials due to fears of appearing prejudiced (aggregated analysis). We found no evidence of first-order disruptions and instead found evidence for second-order disruptions: participants who were more internally motivated to respond without prejudice, and thus more likely to self-monitor their responses, learned less accurately over time. We discuss the implications of the influence of stereotypes on learning and memory.