STEREOTYPES AND TACIT INFERENCE

To judge another person's behavior, one often has to come to an unders tanding of what that behavior was in its detail. Five studies demonstr ated that stereotypes influence the tacit inferences people make about the unspecified details and ambiguities of social behavior (e.g., wha t the behavior specifically was, what stimulus the individual reacted to, what caused the individual to act) and that these inferences occur when people encode the relevant information. One study found that par ticipants who scored low on a measure of modern sexism were just as li kely to make tacit inferences based on gender stereotypes as were thos e who scored high. Discussion centers on the implications of these fin dings for identification processes in social judgment, as well as whet her stereotypes influence tacit inferences at an implicit level.