Priming Welfare Queens and Other Stereotypes:

Specific stereotype portrayals of African American women were hypothesized to produce stereotypeconsistent judgments made of a different African American woman. Participants (N = 76) observed a mammy, jezebel or welfare queen video-segment. Then they observed an African American woman in a mock job interview and rated the interviewee. Participants who observed a specific stereotype associated the interviewee more quickly with stereotype-consistent adjectives than with stereotype-inconsistent adjectives for all three stereotypes. For measures of how suitable the woman was for jobs that were related to the stereotypes, only the welfare queen prime produced significant effects. Research on stereotyping has explored the role of cognitive processes (Devine, 1989), socialization processes (Eagly & Steffen, 2000), and categorization processes (Hugenberg, & Bodenhausen, 2004; Quinn, Macrae, & Bodenhausen, 2003). However, Schneider (2004) argues that questions about the content of stereotypes should be taken as seriously as questions about how and why they develop. The activation-recency hypothesis is used to test whether exposure to within-group stereotypes of African American women affect judgments made of another African American woman. The activation-recency hypothesis states that individuals who are primed with media content use it for subsequent information processing in social situations (Hansen & Hansen, 1988; Dines & Humez, 2003). A limitation of most prior work with this hypothesis is that it overlooks within-group stereotypes. Collins (1991; 2004) argues that African American women are portrayed by media as nurturing asexual mammies, sexually aggressive jezebels, and lazy welfare queens (see also, Bogle, 2001; Gray, 1991). Priming and Stereotyping 2 In a study of within-group stereotyping (_______, 2005), participants observed a mammy, a jezebel or a non-stereotypic video clip. Participants then observed a mock employment interview involving either an African American or European American female. Indirect measures found participants primed with the jezebel stereotype responded more quickly to jezebel-consistent than to mammy-consistent adjectives when evaluating the African American interviewee. No findings were obtained for the mammy prime. The present study hypothesizes that exposure to stereotypic portrayals of African American women will result in subsequent stereotype-consistent judgments of a different African American woman. In addition, researchers argue explicit measures of prejudice and racial attitudes are not as effective as indirect measures because direct measures rely on participants’ willingness to express socially undesirable attitudes (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995; Judd & Park, 1997). Thus, it is hypothesized that the effects of the within-group stereotypes will be stronger when using indirect measures than direct measures.