Bernadette Park

University of Colorado Boulder | CUB · Department of Psychology and Neuroscience

This research explored identity conflict among aspiring professionals, and the association between this conflict and anticipated difficulty in managing parent and career roles. Women (n = 281) and men (n = 300) enrolled in advanced degree programs in the United States completed implicit (session 1) and explicit (session 2) measures of work and pare...

Previous work using implicit tasks has demonstrated associations at a categorical level between men and science-related words (e.g., chemistry, physics, engineering). The current research explores trait attributes, examining the overlap in trait stereotypes of scientists with trait stereotypes of men and women, using both implicit and explicit ster...

Many social psychological variables, in addition to knowledge‐based factors such as academic preparedness, have been investigated individually as sources of the persistent gender gap in pSTEM (physical science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields. The present work tested all of these factors simultaneously and longitudinally, in a samp...

Various social psychological factors have been proposed as influencing the likelihood of pursuing a pSTEM (physical science, technology, engineering, and math) academic major, but no work examines these simultaneously to ask which make independent contributions in explaining pSTEM gender disparities. Three hundred and fifty-two undergraduates in US...

Trait stereotypes of men tend to be more fixed and negative than those of women. The current studies test whether stereotypes of men can be shifted through leveraging their social role as fathers. Trait attributes perceived to characterize women and moms were highly redundant, but those of men and dads were less so; moreover, men were perceived mor...

Psychological essentialism occurs when a category is seen as real, meaningful, and having a basis in an invisible underlying essence. Prior research has demonstrated that mothers are seen in more essentialist terms than fathers (Park, Banchefsky, & Reynolds, 2015). Across two studies using an online survey method (Study 1 N = 408; Study 2 N = 756),...

Male-dominated work environments often possess masculine cultures that are unwelcoming to women. The present work investigated whether male-dominated academic environments were characterized by gender ideologies with negative implications for women. A survey of 2622 undergraduates across a variety of academic majors examined how gender imbalance wi...

Self-to-prototype matching is a strategy of mental comparisons between the self-concept and the typical or “representative” member of a group to make some judgment. Such a process might contribute to interest in pursuing a science career and, relatedly, women’s underrepresentation in physical science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (pSTEM...

This chapter examines gender inequalities in work and family outcomes through the lens of identity construction with a focus on the power of the social context in driving identity conflict. Cultural scripts dictate normative expectations around how to fulfill the roles of mother, father, and worker. The content of the scripts generates greater iden...

Objective: Depression is a major public health concern and often goes untreated. In response to a growing body of research documenting stigma as a barrier to depression care, this study focused on examining public stigma toward potentially vulnerable subpopulations. Methods: Participants (N=241) were recruited from Amazon's Mechanical Turk and r...

The present studies tested a model outlining the effects of group gender composition on self- and others' perceptions of women's math ability in a truly interactive setting with groups composed entirely of naïve participants (N = 158 4-person groups across 3 studies). One woman in each group was designated to be the "expert" by having her complete...

Two studies examined whether subtle variations in feminine appearance erroneously convey a woman’s likelihood of being a scientist. Eighty photos (half women) of tenured/tenure-track science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) faculty at elite research universities were selected from the Internet. Participants, naïve to the targets’ occupatio...

Psychological essentialism is the tendency to view entities as if they have an underlying, often invisible essence that makes them what they are (Medin & Ortony, 1989), and the presence of a genetic basis for group membership contributes to such conceptions (Dar-Nimrod & Heine, 2011; Keller, 2005). We argue that undergoing visually salient physical...

Research on interethnic relations has focused on two ideologies, asking whether it is best to de-emphasize social-category differences (colorblind) or emphasize and celebrate differences (multicultural). We argue each of these can manifest with negative outgroup evaluations: Assimilationism demands that subordinate groups adopt dominant group norms...

We examined the effects of incidental anger on perceived and actual polarization between Democrats and Republicans in the context of two national tragedies, Hurricane Katrina (Study 1) and the mass shooting that targeted Representative Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona (Study 2). We hypothesized that because of its relevance to intergroup conflict, inc...

Fathers have become increasingly involved in childcare and housework. According to social role theory, as fathers engage in more traditionally maternal roles and fewer traditionally paternal roles, they should be seen as having more maternal traits and fewer paternal traits over time, suggesting dynamic stereotypes of fathers. To test this hypothes...

As stereotypes of social groups undergo change, group members gain access to previously denied social and cultural roles. Although such access is desirable, to the extent that the behavior, traits, and attitudes required to succeed in a new role are in opposition to those required to do well in a still-valued old role, conflict in the self-concept...

Two experiments demonstrated that power leads to dehumanizing others, adding to our understanding of how power affects interpersonal perception. Undergraduate participants in dyads were assigned to unequal power roles before interacting cooperatively in a mock hiring-task for Experiment 1 and competitively in a game for Experiment 2. After interact...

Studies have shown that allowing people to answer questionnaires completely anonymously yields more reports of socially inappropriate attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors, and researchers have often assumed that this is evidence of increased honesty. But such evidence does not demonstrate that reports gathered under completely anonymous conditions are...

We examined implicit race biases in the decision to shoot potentially hostile targets in a multiethnic context. Results of two studies showed that college‐aged participants and police officers showed anti‐Black racial bias in their response times: they were quicker to correctly shoot armed Black targets and to indicate “don't shoot” for unarmed Lat...

Three studies examined the implicit evaluative associations activated by racially-ambiguous Black-White faces. In the context of both Black and White faces, Study 1 revealed a graded pattern of bias against racially-ambiguous faces that was weaker than the bias to Black faces but stronger than that to White faces. Study 2 showed that significant bi...

Research shows that participants shoot armed Blacks more frequently and quickly than armed Whites, but make don't-shoot responses more frequently and quickly for unarmed Whites than unarmed Blacks. We argue that this bias reflects the perception of threat - specifically, threat associated with Black males. Other danger cues (not just race) may crea...

While the concept of the “new involved father” has gained popularity in the media and academic circles, it is unclear to what extent behavioral expectations of moms and dads today reflect gender equality. Using a Go/No-Go Task, Study 1 examined implicit associations between behavioral images indicative of childcare versus the professional world wit...

Inherarticle“DiversityScience:WhyandHowDif-ference Makes a Difference,” Plaut (this issue) arguesthat social psychology should put a stronger emphasisonsocioculturalnormsthatguidebehaviorandpercep-tion. One such cultural norm is how ethnic and racialdiversity is construed. Plaut discusses colorblind andmulticultural ideologies as distinctly differe...

The classic definition of social psychology, provided by Gordon W. Allport (1985), is “an attempt to understand and explain how the thought, feeling, and behavior of individuals is influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others.” That is, social psychology studies how we are affected to our very core by the fact that we are funda...

Social cognition research on social categorization and stereotyping has traditionally assumed that outgroup prejudice follows from stereotyping and the categorization process. Consequently, prejudice reduction strategies typically involve efforts to reduce the salience of category boundaries. Challenging this perspective, this chapter argues that n...

Two studies tested whether the boundaries separating groups could be strengthened without increasing intergroup bias. Using a modified minimal group paradigm, the salience of the group distinction was manipulated through instructions that either called attention to the division between the two groups (high salience), or to dimensions orthogonal to...

The perceived warmth and competence of men and women who varied in number of hours worked and childcare responsibilities were assessed using either subjective trait ratings or objective behavioral frequency estimates. Trait ratings were determined by number of hours worked, and not target gender. Estimates of behavioral frequency indicated that wom...

We tested colorblind and multicultural prejudice-reduction strategies under conditions of low and high interethnic conflict. Replicating previous work, both strategies reduced prejudice when conflict was low. But when conflict was high, only the colorblind strategy reduced prejudice (Studies 1 and 2). Interestingly, this colorblind response seemed...

Allport's (and Other Early) Views on the Perception of Group DifferencesDevelopments Since Allport: The Study of Actual and Perceived Group DifferencesForms of Inaccuracies in Beliefs about Group DifferencesGroup Differences and Prejudice Reduction

Using a videogame to simulate encounters with potentially hostile targets, three studies tested a model in which racial bias in shoot/don't-shoot decisions reflects accessibility of the stereotype linking Blacks to danger. Study 1 experimentally manipulated the race-danger association by asking participants to read newspaper stories about Black (vs...

Police officers were compared with community members in terms of the speed and accuracy with which they made simulated decisions to shoot (or not shoot) Black and White targets. Both samples exhibited robust racial bias in response speed. Officers outperformed community members on a number of measures, including overall speed and accuracy. Moreover...

Survey data collected from multiethnic samples of geographically dispersed college students and a national probability sample of US adults were utilized to examine the correlates of support for multiculturalism and assimilation—two competing interethnic ideologies, or ideals for how an ethnically diverse society should optimally function. Endorseme...

We argue that the effect of power on social attention is a function of flexible, instrumental information processing that allows the high power perceiver to attain situation specific goals using whatever means are available, including attention. Study 1 assigned powerful participants to more “people-centered” or more “product-centered” goals, and f...

The research in this article explores the structure and content of attributed intergroup beliefs: to what extent do perceivers think others of their ingroup and their outgroup display intergroup evaluative bias and outgroup homogeneity? We report studies that address this question in ethnicity, gender, and nationality intergroup contexts. In all of...

Résumé : Dans cet article, nous rapportons deux recherches portant sur la structure et le contenu de stéréotypes attribués à autrui : dans quelle mesure pensons-nous que les membres de l'endogroupe et de l'exogroupe font preuve de favoritisme pro-endogroupe et de biais d'homogénéité de l'exogroupe ? Ces deux recherches menées dans le contexte des r...

U.S. citizens' reactions to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, were examined, including emotional responses, attributions for the cause of the attacks, and policy recommendations. Participants whose emotional reactions were dominated by anger attributed the attacks to the fanaticism of the terrorists and to poor U.S. security and rejected...

Social and task groups need a few high-status members who can be leaders and trend setters, and many more lower-status members who can follow and contribute work without challenging the group's direction (Caporael (1997). Personality and Social Psychology Review, 1, 276–298; Caporael & Baron (1997). In: J. Simpson, & D. Kenrick (Eds), Evolutionary...

Drawing on theories of social comparison, realistic group conflict, and social identity, we present an integrative model designed to describe the psychological utility of social groups. We review diverse motivations that group membership may satisfy (e.g., the need for acceptance or ideological consensus) and attempt to link these particular needs...

For the past 40 years, social psychological research on stereotyping and prejudice in the United States has been dominated by the social cognition perspective, which has emphasized the important role of basic categorization processes in intergroup dynamics. An inadvertent consequence of this approach has been a disproportionate focus on social cate...

The question addressed by this chapter is: How do we represent, psychologically, the relations among overlapping and inclusive categories, and how does this representation influence our perception of the nature of social categories and the modifiability of stereotypic beliefs associated with those categories? We address this broad question by consi...

Theory suggests that individuals who are more prejudiced or who have had less intergroup contact are more likely to experience intergroup anxiety. Although prior research has supported those proposals, it is weakened by the use of abstract (and therefore often ambiguous) intergroup encounters. The present research provided better evidence by measur...

Using a simple videogame, the effect of ethnicity on shoot/don't shoot decisions was examined. African American or White targets, holding guns or other objects, appeared in complex backgrounds. Participants were told to "shoot" armed targets and to "not shoot" unarmed targets. In Study 1, White participants made the correct decision to shoot an arm...

We argue that the two different components of group perceptions, namely group evaluations and perceptions of group variability, are affected by intergroup contact in rather different ways. Consistent with considerable existing research in the contact literature, we show that intergroup contact results in more positive target group evaluations, so l...

Using a simple videogame, the effect of ethnicity on shoot/ don't shoot decisions was examined. African American or White targets, holding guns or other objects, appeared in complex backgrounds. Participants were told to “shoot” armed targets and to “not shoot” unarmed targets. In Study 1, White participants made the correct decision to shoot an ar...

The goal of the research reported in this article was to examine whether automatic group attitudes and stereotypes, commonly thought to be fixed responses to a social category cue, are sensitive to changes in the situational context. Two experiments demonstrated such variability of automatic responses due to changes in the stimulus context. In Stud...

The goal of the research reported in this article was to examine whether automatic group attitudes and stereotypes, commonly thought to be fixed responses to a social category cue, are sensitive to changes in the situational context. Two experiments demonstrated such variability of automatic responses due to changes in the stimulus context. In Stud...

To examine whether powerful people fail to individuate the less powerful, the authors assigned participants to either a high-power or low-power role for a computer E-mail role play. In 3 studies, participants in the high-power role made decisions and determined the outcomes of interactions; low-power role players had no power and relied on high-pow...

Researchers in the area of stereotype change have accumulated strong evidence for the subtyping phenomenon, whereby disconfirming members of a group are “fenced-off” or excluded from group perceptions. A variety of measures have been used in past work as indicators of subtyping with no consensus on what is the best measure. This study compared a la...

The goal of the study reported in this article was to examine whether automatic processes in stereotype and prejudice activation are sensitive to task characteristics of the assessment procedure and whether these influences may account for existing inconsistencies that have recently been reported in the literature on automatic racial prejudice. Usi...

At the extreme, social stereotypes can be learned either from direct contact with individual target group members or from communications about the target group received from others. These two forms of stereotype acquisition have consequences for the nature and content of the stereotype that is formed (Park & Hastie, 1987). The present studies exami...

In 3 experiments, White American college students received a message advocating either a color-blind or a multicultural ideological approach to improving interethnic relations and then made judgments about various ethnic groups and individuals. Relative to a color-blind perspective, the multicultural perspective led to stronger stereotypes, greater...

In 3 experiments, White American college students received a message advocating either a color-blind or a multicultural ideological approach to improving interethnic relations and then made judgments about various ethnic groups and individuals. Relative to a color-blind perspective, the multicultural perspective led to stronger stereotypes, greater...

Research on cross-national stereotypes has been largely descriptive, primarily examining the content of such stereotypes rather than exploring more process-related issues concerning stereotype formation, use, and change. One particular component of stereotypes that has implications for these issues is the perceived variability of social categories....

By using a round-robin design, groups of freshmen reported their impressions of dormmates at 4 different times during the year. Consensus on W. T. Norman's Big Five (1963) did not increase over the year, even though reported acquaintance did increase. Agreement in liking predicted agreement in the trait ratings, such that groups that agreed in thei...

The content of spontaneously activated racial stereotypes among White Americans and the relation of this to more explicit measures of stereotyping and prejudice were investigated. Using a semantic priming paradigm, a prime was presented outside of conscious awareness (BLACK or WHITE), followed by a target stimulus requiring a word-nonword decision....

By using a round-robin design, groups of freshmen reported their impressions of dormmates at 4 different times during the year. Consensus on W. T. Norman's Big Five (1963) did not increase over the year, even though reported acquaintance did increase. Agreement in liking predicted agreement in the trait ratings, such that groups that agreed in thei...

The content of spontaneously activated racial stereotypes among White Americans and the relation of this to more explicit measures of stereotyping and prejudice were investigated. Using a semantic priming paradigm, a prime was presented outside of conscious awareness (BLACK or WHITE), followed by a target stimulus requiring a word–nonword decision....

In this paper, we argue that one's public policy stance reliably influences how one judges individual cases of policy application. And to the extent that stereotypes and prejudice have reliable effects on public policy judgments, they have important effects on individual judgments. To test these hypotheses, we assessed subjects' perceptions and jud...

Research has demonstrated better memory for behavior inconsistent wvith an expectation when the target is an individual. When the target is a group, consistent information is better recalled than inconsistent or irrelevant. In this study, the target was an individual, but the expectation derived from his or her membership in a social (gender) group...

We examined the influence of perceived group variability on the use of stereotypes in judging individuals, distinguishing between two forms of perceived variability: stereotypicality and dispersion (Park & Judd, 1990). In Study 1, subjects judged the variability of members of sororities and fraternities and then provided trait and confidence judgme...

Participants were instructed to organize information about group members either by distinguishing stereotype-consistent from stereotype-inconsistent individuals (subtyping instructions), by dividing the individuals into multiple groups on the basis of similarities and differences (subgrouping instructions), or with no explicit organizing instructio...

Much recent work on stereotyping has dealt with groups that are either artificially created or that do not have an extensive history of conflict. The authors attempted to overcome this limitation by examining issues of perceived variability and ethnocentrism among samples of White American and African American youth. The goals were both to examine...

Locksley, Hepburn, and Ortiz have argued that when individuating information is available, (a) Ss rely on this and not gender stereotypes, and (b) Ss' judgments are reliably deviant from a Bayesian normative standard. The authors argue these effects depend on the salience of the base-rate information. In this study, Ss learned about targets' gender...

Two experiments explored the role of perceivers (judges) in aggregating social behavior into impressions. In Experiment 1, it was predicted and found that judges influence impressions (i.e., eye-of-the-beholder effects) not only because they disagree on how to interpret single acts but because they aggregate multiple acts in unique ways to arrive a...

We propose an alternative model of social category representation that suggests people use mental frequency distributions to remember and organize instances along an attribute dimension. We then explore the implications of this model for explaining differences in perceived group variability, including the out-group homogeneity effect. In Experiment...

A perennial issue in the study of social stereotypes concerns their accuracy. Yet, there is no clear concept of the various ways in which stereotypes may be accurate or inaccurate and how one would assess their accuracy. This article is designed to rectify this situation. Three forms of stereotype inaccuracy are identified: stereotypic inaccuracy,...

Five aspects of the complexity of the knowledge representation of business and engineering majors were examined to see whether these differed by group membership and whether these differences were related to differences in perceived variability. Significantly more subgroups were generated when describing the in-group than the out-group; this differ...

Five aspects of the complexity of the knowledge representation of business and engineering majors were examined to see whether these differed by group membership and whether these differences were related to differences in perceived variability. Significantly more subgroups were generated when describing the in-group than the out-group; this differ...

Past research has found higher levels of agreement in personality ratings of others on traits related to extroversion than on other traits such as intelligence, honesty, or conscientiousness, particularly at low levels of acquaintance. One explanation for this effect is that verbal information relevant to these latter traits is less likely to be el...

The accuracy of in-group and out-group variability judgments was examined by comparing those judgments with the variability of self-ratings provided by random samples of group members. Following Park and Judd (1990), perceptions of both group dispersion and group stereotypicality were examined. Accuracy was examined both by within-subject sensitivi...

The accuracy of in-group and out-group variability judgments was examined by comparing those judgments with the variability of self-ratings provided by random samples of group members. Following B. Park and C. M. Judd (1990), perceptions of both group dispersion and group stereotypicality were examined in 116 college students (58 business majors an...

This experiment examined two methods for increasing consensus and reducing biases in trait judgment: (1) outcome dependency, and (2) the presence or absence of particular social roles when making trait judgments. Subjects participated in groups and watched videotapes of eight different peers being interviewed on questions relevant to trait attribut...

We present two models of social category representation, one exemplar-based and one abstraction-based. We examine these with respect to five factors that influence the magnitude of perceived variability: actual level of variability among group members, dependent measures used by experimenters, encoding effects, retrieval effects, and increasing fam...

This article examines alternative measures of perceived variability of a group. The pattern of correlations among the measures suggests that variability can be thought of in 2 ways: the perceived dispersion of group members from the group central tendency and the extent to which the group is seen as fitting the group stereotype. Evidence of out-gro...

Using a round-robin design in which every subject served both as judge and target, subjects made liking judgments, trait ratings, and physical attractiveness ratings of each other on each of 4 days. Although there was some agreement in the liking judgments, most of the variance was due to idiosyncratic preferences for different targets. Differences...

Assesses agreement as a function of the trait being judged, the information presented, and individual differences to spontaneously use particular trait dimensions. In Experiment 1, there was a reliable amount of agreement in rating the targets, but this was greater if the traits were related to extraversion (Factor 1 traits) than to intelligence, h...

Out-groups are generally seen as less variable or diverse than in-groups. Two explanations have been advanced for this out-group homogeneity effect. They differ in whether differential frequency of stored exemplars is a necessary condition for the out-group homogeneity effect. We used a modified minimal group paradigm to discriminate between the tw...

This study examines the contribution of judge characteristics (sex-role identity as defined by the Bern Sex-Role Inventory [BSRI]) and of target characteristics (target gender and sex-typedness) to the social perception process. Subjects classified as feminine, masculine, androgynous, and undifferentiated performed two tasks. In the first, they rea...

We conducted two experiments to investigate the acquisition and representation of social categories, with an emphasis on the perception of variability of group members. In Experiment 1, subjects learned about a group that was sociable and intelligent and either high or low in variability with respect to these attributes. Differences in the actual v...

Investigated the development of impressions of real people in a class of 7 college students (aged 20–27 yrs) who wrote open-ended descriptions of one another each week for 2 wks and completed a series of reaction-time (RT) trait judgments. Data were analyzed with respect to 4 issues: (a) The content of the written protocols was dominated by trait a...

Five alternative information processing models that relate memory for evidence to judgments based on the evidence are identified in the current social cognition literature: independent processing, availability, biased retrieval, biased encoding, and incongruity-biased encoding. A distinction between 2 types of judgment tasks, memory-based vs online...

Argues that trait adjectives vary in how easily they are confirmed or disconfirmed as descriptive of an individual or group. An analysis of the confirmability and disconfirmability of trait descriptive adjectives is proposed in which traits are seen as varying in (a) the number of occasions that allow for confirming or disconfirming behaviors, (b)...

In order for language to achieve its communicative function, it is essential that a given symbol be able to evoke a similar psychological representation across diverse individuals. Although many symbols or words succeed in eliciting highly similar meanings among different people, there is an important domain in which the discrepancies in meanings a...

Explored the hypothesis that in-group members perceive their own group as more variegated and complex than do out-group members (the out-group homogeneity principle). In Exps I and II, 168 men and 171 women estimated the proportion of men or women who would endorse a variety of personality/attitude items that varied on stereotypic meaning (masculin...