THE ROLES OF INFORMATION CHARACTERISTICS AND ACCOUNTABILITY IN MODERATING STEREOTYPE-DRIVEN PROCESSES DURING SOCIAL DECISION-MAKING

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.