Emotions, Arousal, and Stereotypic Judgments: A Heuristic Model of Affect and Stereotyping

Abstract

The heuristic view of stereotyping emphasizes that people use their oversimplified beliefs about social groups as a basis for responding to the members of those groups whenever they lack the desire or the ability to engage in more extensive thought about the individuals. The lack of such desire and/or ability may be common enough under most everyday life circumstances, and it appears that conditions of heightened emotional experience—in particular, anger, anxiety, and happiness—only serve to further reduce the motivation and/or processing capacity. This chapter presents the task of specifying the motivational and cognitive consequences of affective states for information processing. Drawing on the neurological, physiological, and cognitive literatures, Galen V. Bodenhausen develops the hypothesis that some affective states, but not others, produce simplified information processing. He draws out and tests the processing implications of a range of affective states for the use of stereotypic, rather than individuating, information in social perception tasks. The theoretical integration of affective and cognitive processes promises to yield important advances in social psychology generally, but no topic of study seems likely to profit from this reunification more than the study of stereotyping and discrimination.