The stereotyping literature within psychology has grown considerably over the past decade. In large part, this growth can be attributed to progress in understanding the individual mechanisms that give rise to stereotypic thinking. In the current review, the recent psychological literature on stereotypes is reviewed, with particular emphasis given to the cognitive and motivational factors that contribute to stereotype formation, maintenance, application, and change. In addition, the context-dependent function of stereotypes is highlighted, as are the representational issues that various models of stereotypes imply.

Three studies examined the relationship between the Implicit Association Test (IAT) and explicit attitudes. In the 1st and all subsequent studies, the lack of any correlation between the IAT and explicitly measured attitudes supports the view that the IAT is independent from explicit attitudes. Study 2 examined the relationships among the IAT, explicit attitudes, and behavior and found that the explicit attitudes predicted behavior but the IAT did not. Finally, in Study 3 it was found that the IAT was affected by exposing participants to new associations between attitude objects, whereas the explicit attitudes remained unchanged. Taken together, these results support an environmental association interpretation of the IAT in which IAT scores reflect the associations a person has been exposed to in his or her environment rather than the extent to which the person endorses those evaluative associations.

Three studies examined the hypothesis that when perceivers learn of the existence of multiple, plausibly rival motives for an actor's behavior, they are less likely to fall prey to the correspondence bias than when they learn of the existence of situational factors that may have constrained the actor's behavior. In the first 2 studies, Ss who learned that an actor was instructed to behave as he did drew inferences that corresponded to his behavior. In contrast, Ss who were led to suspect that an actor's behavior may have been motivated by a desire to ingratiate (Study 1), or by a desire to avoid an unwanted job (Study 2), resisted the correspondence bias. The 3rd study demonstrated that these differences were not due to a general unwillingness on the part of suspicious perceivers to make dispositional inferences. The implications that these results have for understanding attribution theory are discussed.

The role of suspicion in the dispositional inference process is examined. Perceivers who are led to become suspicious of the motives underlying a target's behavior appear to engage in more active and thoughtful attributional analyses than nonsuspicious perceivers. Suspicious perceivers resist drawing inferences from a target's behavior that reflect the correspondence bias (or fundamental attribution error), and they consciously deliberate about questions of plausible causes and categorizations of the target's behavior They are, however, quite willing to make strong correspondent inferences about the target if they learn additional contextual information that renders alternative explanations for the target's behavior less plausible. Implications of these findings for current multiple-stage models of the dispositional inference process are discussed, and the need for these and other models to give more consideration to the social nature of social perception is asserted.

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