Contingency learning and stereotype formation: Illusory and spurious correlations revisited

This chapter provides a review of recent research on distinctiveness-based illusory correlations and spurious correlations in biased stereotype formation, with a particular focus on the commonalities of the two phenomena. In particular, we critically analyse the impact of episodic memory for specific events on biased stereotype formation, and we investigate the role of salient context factors for contingency learning and stereotypic inference. The reviewed findings question some traditional assumptions concerning the origins of illusory and spurious correlations, which largely relied on the very specifics of the experimental paradigms that produced the effects. The findings are, however, compatible with more integrative theoretical frameworks that allow one to subsume biased stereotypes on the basis of illusory and spurious correlations together with several other judgement biases. Associationistic learning models and pseudo-contingencies are proposed as promising conceptual frameworks.