Galen V Bodenhausen

• Ph.D.
• Professor at Northwestern University

Acquiring information that aids decision-making is subject to a trade-off of accuracy versus cost, given that time, effort, or money are required to obtain decision-relevant information. Three studies (N=2,010) investigated the motivational dynamics shaping the priorities that govern this trade-off. Motivational orientations related to both the dec...

We examined whether perceptions of the health and economic threats posed by COVID-19 predict different patterns of intergroup attitudes, using data gathered during the early phase of the pandemic. Using data from 1339 geographically and politically diverse White US residents, we show that subjective economic threat predicted general anti-outgroup a...

Negative Racial Attitudes (NRA) have been identified as major contributors to discrimination and inequalities. Previous studies of predictors of NRA have focused largely on socioeconomic, socialization, social attitudes, and personality characteristics. Yet, the potential links of psychiatric and affective indicators to NRA have received little sci...

A growing body of scholarship documents the intersectional nature of social stereotyping, with stereotype content being shaped by a target person’s multiple social identities. However, conflicting findings in this literature highlight the need for a broader theoretical integration. For example, although there are contexts in which perceivers stereo...

Risk-taking is sometimes admired and sometimes disparaged. In this research, we examine previously unexplored questions concerning how membership in social groups is related to expectations and perceptions of risk-taking. We propose that prototypes of risk-takers incorporate racial associations. We conducted five studies (NTotal = 1,603, predominan...

We examined the “othering” of Asian Americans in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Given past evidence that pathogen-related threat perceptions can exacerbate intergroup biases, as well as salient public narratives blaming the Chinese for the pandemic, we assessed whether individuals experiencing a greater sense of threat during the pandemic we...

Prior literature has demonstrated the power of zero pricing to boost consumer demand, but the current research shows a novel "boomerang effect": a zero (vs. low, nonzero) price can lower demand when the offer comes with high incidental costs (e.g., the time cost in commuting to an offline class; the physical risk of getting a new vaccine). Five stu...

The growing visibility of transgender women and men in the US challenges a dominant cultural model of gender in which dichotomous sex assigned at birth gives rise to dichotomous gender identity in adulthood. How are these groups – verbally marked as atypical relative to their cisgender counterparts – stereotyped? Moreover, how do gender essentialis...

The growing visibility of transgender women and men in the US challenges a dominant cultural model of gender in which dichotomous sex assigned at birth gives rise to dichotomous gender identity in adulthood. How are these groups – verbally marked as atypical relative to their cisgender counterparts – stereotyped? Moreover, how do gender essentialis...

Racial preferences in sexual attraction are highly visible and controversial. They may also negatively impact those who are excluded. It is unclear whether these preferences are merely self-attributed or extend to patterns of experienced sexual arousal. Furthermore, some argue that racial preferences in sexual attraction reflect idiosyncratic perso...

Most research in evaluative conditioning (EC) documents that a target object (conditioned stimulus, CS) acquires the same valence as a co-occurring affective cue (unconditioned stimulus, US). Some recent studies in EC have found that a CS may acquire the opposite valence as a US when people process a negational relation between the CS and the US, s...

The term "model minority" refers to racial groups of color that have ostensibly achieved a high level of success in contemporary U.S. society. The term has been used most often to describe Asian Americans, a group seen as having attained educational and financial success relative to other immigrant groups. The "model minority" label on its surface...

Stereotyping plays an important role in how we perceive the members of social groups. Yet stereotyping is complicated by the fact that every individual simultaneously belongs to multiple social groups. For example, the stereotypes that are called to mind about a Black individual can vary depending on that person’s age, gender, and sexual orientatio...

Scholars have long recognized that successful prediction of behavior on the basis of explicit attitudes depends on the correspondence between the attitude measure and the focal behavior. Fishbein and Ajzen (2010) argued that behaviors vary in terms of their action, target, context, and time, and that the prediction of specific behaviors is greatly...

Decades of research indicate that the traits we ascribe to people often depend on their race. Yet, the bulk of this research has not considered how racial stereotypes might also depend on other aspects of targets’ identities. To address this, researchers have begun to ask intersectional questions about racial stereotypes, such as whether they are a...

There is ample evidence of racial and gender bias in young children, but thus far this evidence comes almost exclusively from children’s responses to a single social category (either race or gender). Yet we are each simultaneously members of many social categories (including our race and gender). Among adults, racial and gender biases intersect: ne...

Information that conveys racial group membership plays a powerful role in influencing people’s information processing including perceptual, memory and evaluative judgments. Yet whether own- and other-race information can differentially impact people’s perceptual awareness at a preconscious level remains unclear. Employing a breaking continuous flas...

Decades ago, social psychologists documented a juror decision-making bias called the race–crime congruency effect: a tendency to condemn Black men more than White men for stereotypically Black crimes but to do the reverse for stereotypically White crimes. We conducted two high-powered experiments (N = 2,520) to see whether this pattern replicates a...

Are female politicians disadvantaged by adverse economic conditions in ways their male counterparts are not? To examine this issue, we had participants read a news article about the current economic situation. The article emphasized either economic stability or volatility. Afterward, they evaluated an advertisement for either a female or a male can...

Social stereotypes provide a basis for making guesses about others' unknown characteristics. We conducted four studies examining the role of perceived category fit in this process. Disconfirming a particular group stereotype should reduce a target's perceived category fit and, consequently, other distinct stereotypes about the category should seem...

Evaluative conditioning (EC) is defined as the change in the evaluation of a conditioned stimulus (CS) due to its pairing with a positive or negative unconditioned stimulus (US). According to the associative-propositional evaluation (APE) model, EC effects can be the result of two functionally distinct learning mechanisms: associative and propositi...

We investigated the racial content of perceivers’ mental images of different socioeconomic categories. We selected participants who were either high or low in prejudice toward the poor. These participants saw 400 pairs of visually noisy face images. Depending on condition, participants chose the face that looked like a poor person, a middle income...

The authors insert a missing affiliation “The State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Science, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China” for Xiaoqing Hu, and modify Yuhao Lu's affiliation to “School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD 4072, Australia”. The authors would like to apol...

Do numbers have gender? Wilkie and Bodenhausen (2012) examined this issue in a series of experiments on perceived gender. They examined the perceived gender of baby faces and foreign names. Arbitrary numbers presented with these faces and names influenced their perceived gender. Specifically, odd numbers connoted masculinity, while even numbers con...

Although people may endorse egalitarianism and tolerance, social biases can remain operative and drive harmful actions in an unconscious manner. Here, we investigated training to reduce implicit racial and gender bias. Forty participants processed counterstereotype information paired with one sound for each type of bias. Biases were reduced immedia...

The present study investigated the extent to which people can suppress unwanted autobiographical memories in a memory-detection context involving a mock crime. Participants encoded sensorimotor-rich memories by enacting a lab-based crime (stealing a ring) and received instructions to suppress memory of the crime in order to evade guilt detection in...

In naming our species in his biological taxonomy, Linnaeus (1758) chose Homo sapiens, designating us as " the wise/knowing man. " Explicit in this choice is the belief that the construction of meaningful knowledge is the preeminent characteristic separating our species from its biological cousins. In Descent of Man, Darwin (1871) further underscore...

A central theme in contemporary psychology is the distinction between implicit and explicit evaluation. Research has shown various dissociations between the two kinds of evaluations, including different antecedents, different consequences, and discrepant evaluations of the same object. The current article provides a brief review of the associative–...

Categorization plays a fundamental role in organizing daily interactions with the social world. However, there is increasing recognition that social categorization is often complex, both because category membership can be ambiguous (e.g., multiracial or transgender identities) and because different categorical identities (e.g., race and gender) may...

We present a theoretical model of reappropriation-taking possession of a slur previously used exclusively by dominant groups to reinforce another group's lesser status. Ten experiments tested this model and established a reciprocal relationship between power and self-labeling with a derogatory group term. We first investigated precursors to self-la...

Aggression pervades modern life. To understand the root causes of aggression, researchers have developed several methods to assess aggressive inclinations. The current article introduces a new behavioral method-the voodoo doll task (VDT)-that offers a reliable and valid trait and state measure of aggressive inclinations across settings and relation...

The ability to produce meaningful evaluations of the external world (i.e., attitudes) is critical for adaptive functioning. However, to be fully adaptive, such evaluations must be flexible enough to change when circumstances warrant. The psychological processes involved in attitude change have been the subject of intensive investigation for over 50...

Social cognition consists of the psychological processes through which individuals construct a meaningful understanding of their social environment. A key assumption of this approach is that it is the perceiver's subjective construal of the social world—rather than the objective circumstances—that controls much of human behavior. However, subjectiv...

One of the most heavily debated questions in implicit social cognition is the extent to which implicit measures can be voluntarily controlled. The experiment reported here is the first to employ a novel strategy for intentionally controlling performance in the autobiographical Implicit Association Test (aIAT). Specifically, when explicitly instruct...

Despite the continuing, adverse impact of discrimination on the lives of racial and ethnic minorities, the denial of discrimination is commonplace. Four experiments investigated the efficacy of perspective taking as a strategy for combating discrimination denial. Participants who adopted a Black or Latino target's perspective in an initial context...

Persuasive messages are more effective when they are custom-tailored to reflect the interests and concerns of the intended audience. Much of the message-framing literature has focused on the advantages of using either gain or loss frames, depending on the motivational orientation of the target group. In the current study, we extended this research...

Correlational evidence indicates that materialistic individuals experience relatively low levels of well-being. Across four experiments, we found that situational cuing can also trigger materialistic mind-sets, with similarly negative personal and social consequences. Merely viewing desirable consumer goods resulted in increases in materialistic co...

Four experiments examined the effects of perspective taking on processes contributing to stereotype maintenance: biases in social memory, behavior explanations, and information seeking. The first two experiments explored whether perspective taking influences memory and spontaneous explanations for stereotype-relevant behaviors. Relative to particip...

Social categorization and the perception of social groups The importance of social categories in everyday life is made woefully evident in daily world news. Consider the case of Sabbar Kashur, a Palestinian living in Jerusalem who by habit adopted a Jewish nickname, Dudu. People just assumed Dudu was Jewish; his life was easier that way. However, a...

Why do people behave aggressively toward romantic partners, and what can put the brakes on this aggression? Provocation robustly predicts aggression in both intimate and nonintimate relationships. Four methodologically diverse studies tested the hypothesis that provocation severity and relationship commitment interact to predict aggression toward o...

We examined the possibility that nonsocial, highly generic concepts are gendered. Specifically, we investigated the gender connotations of Arabic numerals. Across several experiments, we show that the number 1 and other odd numbers are associated with masculinity, whereas the number 2 and other even numbers are associated with femininity, in ways t...

Similar to members of the public, people with mental illness may exhibit general negative automatic prejudice against their own group. However, it is unclear whether more specific negative stereotypes are automatically activated among diagnosed individuals and how such automatic stereotyping may be related to self-reported attitudes and emotional r...

Five experiments investigated the hypothesis that perspective taking--actively contemplating others' psychological experiences--attenuates automatic expressions of racial bias. Across the first 3 experiments, participants who adopted the perspective of a Black target in an initial context subsequently exhibited more positive automatic interracial e...

A central theme in contemporary psychology is the distinction between implicit and explicit evaluations. Research has shown various dissociations between the two kinds of evaluations, including different antecedents, different consequences, and discrepant evaluations of the same object. The associative–propositional evaluation (APE) model accounts...

The term "model minority" refers to minority groups that have ostensibly achieved a high level of success in contemporary US society. The term has been used most often to describe Asian Americans, a group seen as having attained educational and financial success relative to other immigrant groups. The "model minority" label on its surface seems to...

Whereas some research suggests that acknowledgment of the role of biogenetic factors in mental illness could reduce mental illness stigma by diminishing perceived responsibility, other research has cautioned that emphasizing biogenetic aspects of mental illness could produce the impression that mental illness is a stable, intrinsic aspect of a pers...

Social cognition research investigates the way information present in the social environment is represented and used in adaptively guiding behavior. Representations of persons and of social relationships form the basic building blocks of social cognition, and we review what is known about how such representations are constructed and constituted. In...

Meritocratic worldviews that stress personal responsibility, such as the Protestant ethic or general beliefs in a just world, are typically associated with stigmatizing attitudes and could explain the persistence of mental illness stigma. Beliefs in a just world for oneself ("I get what I deserve"), however, are often related to personal well-being...

People with mental illness often internalize negative stereotypes, resulting in self-stigma and low self-esteem ("People with mental illness are bad and therefore I am bad, too"). Despite strong evidence for self-stigma's negative impact as assessed by self-report measures, it is unclear whether self-stigma operates in an automatic, implicit manner...

Perceived legitimacy of discrimination shapes reactions to mental illness stigma among stigmatized individuals. We assessed deliberately endorsed versus automatic shame-related reactions to mental illness as predictors of change in perceived legitimacy of discrimination over six months among 75 people with mental illness. Automatically activated sh...

Social psychological research is increasingly coming to grips with the complexity of social identity within the individual, both from the perspective of perceivers trying to form impressions and make judgments about multiply categorizable targets, as well as from the perspective of actors using their different self-aspects as a framework for guidin...

Drawing on our Associative-Propositional Evaluation (APE) Model, we argue for the usefulness of distinguishing between basic operating principles of learning processes (associative linking vs. propositional reasoning) and secondary features pertaining to the conditions of their operation (automatic vs. controlled). We review empirical evidence that...

Implicit attitudes are automatically activated evaluative impulses that are difficult to control and potentially outside conscious awareness. The association of implicit attitudes toward psychiatric medication with treatment adherence and insight was investigated in 85 persons with schizophrenia, schizoaffective, or affective disorders using the Br...

A substantial literature has examined the nature of social categorization, a fundamental process having important implications for a wide variety of social phenomena. The great majority of this research has focused on the role of particular, clearly identified social categories (e.g. race, nationality, etc.) while ignoring or holding constant other...

The issue of race has followed Barack Obama since he emerged on the national political scene, continuing unabated throughout his successful 2008 presidential campaign. Although the issue of race is not always explicitly acknowledged or discussed by Obama himself, the implications of his successful candidacy for U.S. politics and the ways people in...

The stigma of mental illness imposes substantial costs on both the individuals who experience mental illness and society at large. Understanding the psychological underpinnings of this stigma is therefore a matter of practical and theoretical significance. In a national, Web-based survey experiment, we investigated the role played by gender in mode...

Historically, the principle of hypodescent specified that individuals with one Black and one White parent should be considered Black. Two experiments examined whether categorizations of racially ambiguous targets reflect this principle. Participants studied ambiguous target faces accompanied by profiles that either did or did not identify the targe...

The present article provides an analysis of the attitude construct from the perspective of the Associative-Prepositional Evaluation Model (APE Model). It is argued that evaluative responses should be understood in terms of their underlying mental processes: associative and propositional processes. Whereas associative processes are characterized by...

Research in the cognitive dissonance tradition has shown that choosing between two equally attractive alternatives leads to more favorable evaluations of chosen as compared to rejected alternatives (spreading-of-alternatives effect). The present research tested associative self-anchoring as an alternative mechanism for post-decisional changes of im...

This chapter reviews recent research on social categorization, emphasizing a variety of issues that reflect potentially important differences between social and nonsocial cognition. Several relevant factors have been shown to give a particular category the edge in its race to capture the social perception process. Categories that are normatively ra...

Three studies investigated how inclusion versus exclusion strategies differentially lead to stereotypic decisions. In inclusion strategies, suitable targets are selected from a list of candidates, whereas in exclusion strategies, unsuitable candidates are eliminated. Across 2 separate target domains (Study 1: male and female politicians; Studies 2...

Commentators on B. Gawronski and G. V. Bodenhausen's (2006) recently proposed associative-propositional evaluation (APE) model raised a number of interesting conceptual, empirical, and metatheoretical issues. The authors consider these issues and conclude that (a) the conceptual criticisms raised against the APE model are based on misinterpretation...

A central theme in recent research on attitudes is the distinction between deliberate, “explicit” attitudes and automatic, “implicit” attitudes. The present article provides an integrative review of the available evidence on implicit and explicit attitude change that is guided by a distinction between associative and propositional processes. Wherea...

This research examined the effects of stereotypic beliefs and hindsight biases on perceptions of court cases. Subjects read evidentiary material pertaining to a criminal trial in which the defendant either was a stereotyped offender or was not. Additionally, some subjects were given outcome information about the verdict attained in the trial; half...

Within the framework of dual-process models of persuasion, it was hypothesized that including references to kin in a persuasive speech might either (a) promote greater scrutiny of the message by making it seem more value-relevant, or (b) serve as a simple peripheral cue of value congruence. Republicans, Democrats, and Independents read a political...

Social cognition research studies the cognitive structures and processes that shape our understanding of social situations and that mediate our behavioral reactions to them. The fundamental assumption of social cognition research is the idea that internal mental representations of other persons and of social situations play a key causal role in sha...

Performance on measures of implicit social cognition has been shown to vary as a function of the momentary accessibility of relevant information. The present research investigated the mechanisms underlying accessibility effects of self-generated information on implicit measures. Results from 3 experiments demonstrate that measures based on response...

Five studies tested the assumptions: (a) that ingroups are habitually used as a standard of comparison for outgroup judgments, and (b) that outgroup judgments are generally contrasted away from a momentary construal of the ingroup. Results generally support these assumptions. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated increased activation levels of ingroup k...

Analogical inferences can modify people's understanding, but can this occur even when the inferences are unpalatable? We report two experiments suggesting that this is the case. Participants read a source passage on the role and status of gay people in society. Half then read an analogy describing the historical persecution of left-handers. On a su...

From a social psychological perspective, the study of mental illness stigma constitutes a specific application of stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination research. Social psychological approaches to understanding these phenomena more generally are therefore directly relevant to understanding mental illness stigma more specifically. These approa...

Two studies tested the hypothesis that perceivers' prejudice and targets' facial expressions bias race categorization in stereotypic directions. Specifically, we hypothesized that racial prejudice would be more strongly associated with a tendency to categorize hostile (but not happy) racially ambiguous faces as African American. We obtained support...

Although all people belong to a multitude of different social categories and occupy various social roles, the mechanism(s) through which people manage such a complex and potentially incoherent self-concept is not well understood. We report a study showing that excitatory and inhibitory processes act in tandem to keep potentially conflicting self-ca...

We employed the retrieval-practice paradigm to test the hypothesis that stereotypes are organized in a meaningful, valence-based way that promotes evaluative coherence. Replicating previous research, we demonstrated that the rehearsal of traits known to describe a target person produced enhanced recall of those practiced traits and reduced recall o...

We propose that social attitudes, and in particular implicit prejudice, bias people's perceptions of the facial emotion displayed by others. To test this hypothesis, we employed a facial emotion change-detection task in which European American participants detected the offset (Study 1) or onset (Study 2) of facial anger in both Black and White targ...

In seeking to understand how the goal of providing efficient and effective mental health services can best be attained, services researchers have developed principles and methods that distinguish it from other research approaches. In 2000, the National Institute of Mental Health called for translational research paradigms that seek to expand the co...

We present a model of reappropriation, the phenomenon whereby a stigmatized group revalues an externally imposed negative label by self-consciously referring to itself in terms of that label. The model specifies the causes and consequences of reappropriation as well as the essential conditions necessary for reappropriation to be effective. To place...

The present research investigated the generation of memory illusions. In particular, it attempted to delineate the conditions under which category-based thinking prompts the elicitation of false memories. Noting fundamental differences in the manner in which expected and unexpected person-related information is processed and represented in the mind...

When judging another person, people often spontaneously compare this person with themselves. Six studies examined the self-evaluative consequences of such spontaneous comparisons with in-group versus out-group members. They demonstrate that spontaneous comparisons with in-group members primarily involved the activation of specific individuating kno...

We report two studies investigating the impact of how a stereotype-inconsistent exemplar is categorized. In both studies, participants were presented with a description about a specific target and worked on different categorization tasks. Categorization tasks eliciting an inclusion of the target into the group category resulted in less stereotypic...