by AYELET FISHBACH
Society’s stereotypes can slip into communication in subtle ways
Say you saw something unusual—such as a blue strawberry or a purple cat. You’d engage with it more, hoping to make sense of it. Psychologists have recognized this tendency for many years. Even infants stare longer at an object they find surprising. We have found that people will also use more words to describe something that defies their expectations for others rather than conforming to those expectations. We call this phenomenon the “surprised elaboration effect.”
This effect can reveal hidden or subconscious biases about people from different racial or ethnic backgrounds, according to research by my colleague Lauren Eskreis-Winkler of Northwestern University and me. In the U.S., society often links Black and Latino communities with people living in poverty or in a dangerous neighborhood. These associations become the seeds for implicitly biased thinking: without bad intentions, people start to expect the worst for individuals from minority backgrounds. In a series of studies, we found that when people are asked to write about situations that run counter to expectations linked to race or ethnicity—a good thing happening to a member of a racial or ethnic minority group, for instance—they use a lot more words. The length of their responses points to stereotypes that they may not even think they carry but that nonetheless influence their thinking.
To understand how stereotypes spur surprised elaboration, we studied public records to compare reports related to individuals of different races and ethnicities. For example, we reviewed 1,051 missing-child posters created by law enforcement agencies in California, Texas, Florida and New York State. The state records identified these children as white, Black or Hispanic.
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