My background

I received my B.A. in Psychology from the College of Arts & Sciences at Northwestern University this June. While at Northwestern, I was involved in several projects with Dr. Jeff Sherman, a social psychologist. My interests in social psychology center around social cognition, specifically impression formation and attentional resources used in making judgments about character traits. I am in the process of collaborating with Dr. Sherman on a project examining a situation in which explicit and implicit memory are affected differentially in a task of social judgment.




Clinical Psychology

Psychology provokes my interest because of the sheer scope of the material that it aims to investigate. While much attention is ritually paid to issues of in what the field of psychology should not delve, the fact that there are so many basic questions about human behavior that remain unanswered makes that question seem a bit far-sighted! A field as young and expansive as psychology has much to look forward to in the way of descriptive and analytic research.

Abnormal psychology has been my subject of choice for a long while, due to the fact that so many people are affected by mental illness, yet so little is known about the causes and processes of even the most basic illnesses. For example, although affective disorders are among the most prevalent psychiatric disorders in the United States (about 8% according to ECA), and there are those who are convinced that they all emanate from some given source (be it biochemical, psychological, or social), the fact remains that the mechanisms by which 'depression' or 'mania' take their effect remain to be pinpointed. My Seasonal Affective Disorders Homepage




Current Activities

I am presently a third-year student in the Illinois Institute of Technology's Clinical Psychology program. My current research is primarily in Seasonal Affective Disorder. This syndrome is characterized by affective symptoms which center around certain season changes, typically the summer/winter shift.

I am also managing part of the website for the Institute of Psychology, and am directing my energies toward making that site more informative and engaging. With effort and creativity, it may soon be possible for anyone in cyberspace to navigate directly into the Institute of Psychology and examine, in excruciating detail, the research interests and happenings of all those at the Institute!



Career Goals


Si se dice mil palabras solo una foto...





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Impressions and Levels of Prejudice By Omar Azam

Social categorization is an activity that people engage in everyday, and it determines, to a large part, who these people will interact with, who they will trust, and ultimately, who they will judge to be similar to them. Like many other psychological processes, it seems that social categorization happens almost "automatically" (Devine, 1989). By this, what is meant is that categorization is not a task that necessarily requires active attention. Perhaps because as humans we are so familiar with the stimuli (other humans) and the goal (making a judgment about them), we find it a relatively undaunting task to make judgments about other people. Such judgments include, for example, whether or not a target conforms to a trait or how likely it is that the perceiver would aid the target. Research has shown that, indeed, people can go about assessing others without them explicitly paying attention to the task.

Social categorization has been shown to rely to some extent on the use of group stereotypes. The term "stereotype," as it was used by its originator, Walter Lippman (1922), referred to supposed "little pictures we carry around in our heads." The term has evolved to have various meanings, among these a popular and a social psychological one. To the public, stereotyping implies the use of dysfunctional categorization strategies that are greatly influenced by motivational factors. Research in social psychology has shown, however, that stereotyping is more ubiquitous than was previously thought. Humans inevitably group people on the basis of certain traits, and although stereotypes are somewhat one-dimensional and sometimes lead to instantaneous negative appraisals, they are part and parcel of the human memory system. It is useful for human beings, when they are in contact with such a large variety of people and groups, to invent words that describe members of these groups. As such, stereotypes are part of the shared societal consciousness. The majority of people in the United States, for example, could tell you what the stereotype of a homosexual male would be, for example, although there is no concrete research supporting the notion that those who possess this knowledge are necessarily discriminatory or prejudiced. Actual members of groups are more likely than not to be familiar with stereotypes of groups of which they are part. It seems self-evident that stereotypical knowledge of a well-known group, then, is accessible to most members of a population.

Stereotypes are important from a behavioral standpoint only to the extent in which they play a part in discriminatory behavior. To this end, psychologists have aimed to examine what role these mental constructs play on actual behavior towards target groups. Devine (1989) found that stereotypes do exist in the minds of even low prejudiced people. Furthermore, they are highly accessible knowledge structures that can be automatically activated, even if they are not actually endorsed. Thus, since knowledge of group stereotypes are present in our consciousness, responding in a low prejudiced manner requires inhibition of these highly accessible schemata.

Psychologists, although they would have to agree on the notion that stereotypes do exist in our language, do not presently agree on some fundamental aspects of the functional nature of stereotypes and their close relatives, prototypes. "Prototypes" are central members of a category, and as with nonsocial categorization, research has supported the notion that stereotypes are maximally useful if they represent prototypical members of a category. When one is asked to think of the stereotype of a "homosexual male," one would probably not call to mind a picture of a male who is Republican or who is in the army. The picture that one would call to mind would be a cluster of descriptive traits and other facets of the personality of a typical person in that group. The evidence that people do recall prototypical members of a category better that marginal members is robust (Rips?). However, how do people create these prototypical impressions of group members? Does it happen on-line, when the person is asked to recall the group's stereotype? Or is it preformed and then regurgitated from crystallized impressions at the time of the judgment task? More fundamental is the question of how large a role encountered exemplars from the category play in subsequent categorization, and if they do, then at what temporal point in the judgment making context do they exert any influence. Smith & Zarate (1992) and Linville et al. (1989) have found that exemplars are sufficient to produce a prototype and this mechanism can account furthermore for phenomena such as the Outgroup Homogeneity Effect (OHE). Whereas such research has found that exemplar processing models are sufficient, they do not prove that they are necessary or efficient. Pure exemplar models of stereotyping have been challenged as inefficient (Hamilton & J.W. Sherman, 1994). Also, on-line processing would be difficult with groups that have large numbers of exemplars (Hastie & Park, 1986; Park & Hastie, 1987).

At the other end of the theoretical spectrum is the view that abstract impressions play a central role in producing group stereotypes, and that when a categorization task is encountered, exemplars will usually be important only insofar as they influence the group stereotype. Pure abstraction models are not supported by evidence such as that of Mackie, Sherman, & Worth (1993), for example, that found that there is a positive correlation between information recalled about a group and judgments made about the group. Such evidence suggests exemplar-based group knowledge. It is important to take note, however, of the fact that there is ample evidence suggesting the opposite, i.e. that there is a lack of positive correlation between information that participants can remember about group members and judgments they make about the group (e.g. Park & Hastie, 1987; Judd & Park, 1988).

Discrepant findings such as these have led to dual process theories that incorporate elements of both abstraction- and exemplar-based models (Busemeyer et al., 1984; Klein et al., 1992). Research on impression formation and self-perception has supported such a mixed model of social perception (Klein et al., 1992). The conditions of the task have been found to determine to what varying extent a perceiver will use abstract information or exemplar knowledge to make a decision.

One variable that has been found to be important in this determination is the amount of knowledge a perceiver has about the group. Sherman (in press) found evidence that the more information that is accumulated about a group, the more likely it is that an abstract impression will be used to answer a trait judgment task such as, "Is Bob kind?" At low levels of experience, group typicality knowledge is represented in terms of specific group members. But as experience increases, an abstract stereotype is formed that is stored and retrieved independently of knowledge about particular exemplars.

Another variable that has been shown to play a role in determining which mode of knowledge will be brought to bear on a trait judgment task is the relevancy of the trait to the group stereotype (Sherman, in press). For example, kindness is a dimension of importance to the stereotype of priests: they are typically kind. Intelligence, on the other hand, is an irrelevant dimension. When asked to judge whether a particular priest is kind, abstract information about priests in general may be preferentially used due to the highly accessible stereotype (Devine, 1989) of kind priests. This would free the perceiver from the task of actually weighing exemplar knowledge about the priest on-line. This would preserve attentional resources and is consistent with the accepted trend (see S.J. Sherman, Judd, & Park, 1989) that people, whenever possible, act as "cognitive misers." However, when asked if that priest were intelligent, exemplar knowledge would be brought to bear since the stereotype of priests does not provide information about intelligence to answer the question. Sherman found this trend in his experiment with priest and engineer stereotypes. That exemplars are activated during one task (irrelevant task) and not the other (consistent task) provides further support for the idea that dependence upon exemplars depends on what task is being performed by the perceiver. A dual model can account for these findings whereas an either/or model cannot.

This tendency to automatically attribute stereotype-consistent traits to targets is an alarming one since it flies in the face of logic about rational decision making. Even when subjects are presented with relatively small amounts of information about an individual, as in Sherman's study (in press), they do not seem to activate exemplar information when asked to assess whether a target conforms to a stereotype-consistent trait. However, this phenomenon does make sense in the context of Devine's (1989) belief that stereotypes are very tempting to the decision maker because of their easy accessibility. This reasoning would predict therefore that even low prejudice people who do not embrace stereotype-consistent views, are nevertheless prone to preferential attention at the encoding stage and preferential retrieval at the judgment stage. Increased knowledge about a stereotype might not automatically lead to prejudicial behavior, but because a salient stereotype is at the disposal of the perceiver, the chances it may get used may increase. Even though this tendency is not a consciously "motivated" prejudice, it is due to motivational factors at the lower cognitive levels where encoding and retrieval strategies come into play.

It has been shown, then, that amount of knowledge and relevancy of task do influence the likelihood that exemplars will be activated in a judgment task about a target. An obvious question that has not been given much attention is, "Do clearly prejudicial people even use exemplars when rating targets on stereotype-consistent traits?" Sherman's study (in press) found that questions with highly accessible answers ("Is this priest kind?") lead to relative nondependence on exemplars. If people with high levels of prejudice were found to be using abstraction-based strategies and low-prejudiced people were found to be using exemplar strategies, then this would provide further support for a mixed model and would demonstrate another variable that influences whether or not exemplars will be used in a categorization task.

Previous research supports the notion that high and low prejudiced people would use different strategies at the time of retrieval. Devine (1989) argues that whereas stereotypes are accessible and are activated almost automatically, to respond in a non-stereotypical way, such as low prejudiced people do, requires inhibition of this stereotype in favor of less accessible, more rational, belief-based strategies. This framework implies, then, that low prejudiced people do have the same stereotype at disposal, but are more careful in the application of the stereotypical knowledge. They would be more likely to "check the evidence" by referring to the exemplar knowledge that is directly related to the task at hand. Low prejudiced people, therefore want to individuate, whereas high prejudiced people are content with application of stereotypical knowledge.

Since along with retrieval strategies, encoding strategies are a relevant issue in categorization tasks, attention should be turned to the literature on differential encoding strategies as a function of personal relevance of information. First, it is important to note that attentional allocation is at the heart of encoding processes since it determines what will and will not be stored in memory. Therefore, motivational factors (such as prejudice) are important to the memory system at the time of encoding only insofar as they bias the type of information that is encoded and the salience of that information in memory. At present, the schema-filter model provides the dominant framework to explain how the memory system is influenced by preconceived notions such as those held by people who are highly prejudiced. The schema-filter model asserts that the stronger a stereotype is, the more biased processing will be toward stereotype-confirming and away from stereotype-disconfirming information. Therefore, a person with high prejudice against homosexuals will be more likely to fixate on stereotype-consistent exemplar information. If this is true, then highly prejudiced people should be more likely to have salient impressions of a feminine (stereotype-consistent) gay man, for example. Then at the time of recall, exemplar information should be more salient to the person with high prejudice, which should in turn lead to a greater likelihood to rely on exemplar information. Note that this prediction runs counter to the earlier prediction based on the mixed model, such that low-prejudiced people, because of their desire to individuate, should be more likely to rely on exemplars than people with high levels of prejudice.

A way to accommodate both of these predictions is to examine what is meant by the phrase, "to rely on exemplar knowledge." People with high prejudice may have more salient exemplar knowledge, but may fail to use it in a judgment task. And people with low prejudice may have weaker impressions of exemplar information, but may pay special attention to it at the time of a judgment task. In this way, metacognitive strategies aimed at reducing cognitive dissonance may supersede the raw data (i.e. exemplar and abstract impressions) at the time of judgment. Therefore, a study to solve the problem of whether low or high prejudiced people have superior memory for exemplars is relevant to issues of representation, attention, and motivation.

References:

Busemeyer, J.R., Dewey, G.I., & Medin, D.L. (1984). Evaluation of exemplar-based generalization and the abstraction of categorical information. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 10, 638-648.

Devine, P.G. (1989). Stereotypes and prejudice: Their automatic and controlled components. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 56, 5-18.

Hamilton, D.L., & Sherman, J.W. (1994). Stereotypes. In R.S. Wyer, Jr., & T.K. Srull (Eds.) Handbook of social cognition (2nd Ed., Vol. 2, pp. 1-68). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Hastie, R., & Park, B. (1986). The relationship between memory and judgment depends on whether the judgment task is memory-based or on-line. Psychological Review, 93, 258-268.

Judd, C.M., & Park, B. (1988). Out-group homogeneity: Judgments of variability at the individual and group levels. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54, 778-788.

Klein, S.B., Loftus, J., & Burton, H.A. (1989). Two self-reference effects: The importance of distinguishing between self-descriptiveness judgments and autobiographical retrieval in self-referent encoding. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 56, 853-865.

Klein, S.B., Loftus, J., Trafton, J.G., & Fuhrman, R.W. (1992). Use of exemplars and abstractions in trait judgments: A model of trait knowledge about the self and others. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63, 739-753.

Linville, P.W., Fischer, G.W., & Salovey, P. (1989). Perceived distributions of the characteristics of in-group and out- group members: Empirical evidence and a computer simulation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57, 165- 188.

Lippman, W. (1922). Public opinion. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.

Mackie, D.M., Sherman, J.W., & Worth, L.T. (1993). On-line and memory-based processes in group variability judgments. Social Cognition, 11, 44-69.

Park, B., & Hastie, R. (1987). Perception of variability in category development: Instance- versus abstraction-based stereotypes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53, 621-635.

Sherman, J.W. (in press). Development and Mental Representation of Stereotypes. Journal of Personality Psychology.

Sherman, S.J., Judd, C.M., & Park, B. (1989)

Smith, E.R., & Zarate, M.A. (1992). Exemplar-based model of social judgment. Psychological Review, 99, 3-21.

© 1996 by Omar Azam