Can counter-stereotypes boost flexible thinking?
By M. Gocłowska, R. Crisp, Kirsty Labuschagne. 2013
110 citations recorded by the source corpus.
To reduce prejudice psychologists design interventions requiring people to think of counter-stereotypes (i.e., people who defy stereotypic expectations—a strong woman, a Black President). Grounded in the idea that stereotypes constrain the ability to think flexibly, we propose that thinking of counter-stereotypes can have benefits that extend beyond the goal of prejudice reduction—in particular to tasks measuring cognitive flexibility and creative performance. Findings supported this conjecture. In Experiment 1 priming a gender counter-stereotype enhanced cognitive flexibility. This effect could not be attributed to changes in mood. In Experiment 2, using a gender-independent manipulation, priming various social counter-stereotypes brought a boost to creative performance. We discuss implications of these extended benefits of counter-stereotypic thinking for developing future prejudice-reduction interventions.
Subfields: Applied Psychology, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/34c391807b2d21cab818699641b75710d50d1e97
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In Applied Psychology
In Social Psychology
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Citations in the corpus
- A Sociocultural Theory of Creativity: Bridging the Social, the Material, and the Psychological (2020, background): “A more recent line of research into counter-stereotypes shows that offering this kind of information boosts flexible and divergent thinking (Gocłowska & Crisp, 2013; Gocłowska et al., 2013).”