K. Hattrup et Jk. Ford, THE ROLES OF INFORMATION CHARACTERISTICS AND ACCOUNTABILITY IN MODERATING STEREOTYPE-DRIVEN PROCESSES DURING SOCIAL DECISION-MAKING, Organizational behavior and human decision processes, 63(1), 1995, pp. 73-86
Two experiments were conducted to assess the effects of stereotype ava
ilability, stereotype-consistency of attribute information, and accoun
tability on information acquisition during social judgment. Subjects u
sed a computer-controlled information board to request items of indivi
duating information describing several target ratees who were either l
abeled with stereotypic occupation titles (e.g., librarian) or were pr
esented with non-descriptive labels (e.g., ''Person 1''). Main effects
of stereotype labeling supported the prediction that decision makers
would gather fewer individuating items of information about targets, a
nd would examine the information for less time, when targets were labe
led with stereotypic category membership. While a main effect of accou
ntability indicated greater attention to attribute information overall
, a three-way interaction between labeling, information consistency, a
nd accountability indicated that stereotype inconsistencies undercut b
iased information seeking only when decision makers were unaccountable
for their judgments. Accountable decision makers appeared to rely on
available stereotypes during information acquisition, regardless of th
e stereotype-consistency of available target information. This suggest
s that accountability may induce ''freezing'' (Kruglanski, 1990) on ea
rly stereotype-based opinions within complex social judgment tasks. Re
sults provided support for previous research on stereotype-driven proc
esses during the attention stage of social perception and implicated c
omplex motivational processes as determinants of category-based and pi
ece-meal processing. (C) Academic Press, Inc.