People encountering deviants who violate a stereotype try to maintain the stereotype by subtyping the deviants. They use the deviants' additional attributes to justify subtyping them. Participants read about counterstereotypic targets. Participants who were given no additional information about targets, and so had no grounds for subtyping them, did generalize from them and changed their stereotypes. However, participants who were told that targets had an additional, neutral attribute appeared to use it as grounds for subtyping them; their stereotypes remained unchanged. Participants came to view the neutral attributes as atypical of the stereotype and as associated with deviance, that is, as good reasons for subtyping the deviant. Neutral attributes blocked generalization from truly counterstereotypic targets but not from overly stereotypic ones, suggesting that their effect was due to participants' attempts to explain away individuals who strongly challenge their stereotypes.

We discuss the construct of doubt about one's competence and suggest that doubt can have myriad consequences (e.g., self-handicapping, defensive pessimism). We focus on the effect of self-doubt when it is combined with a concern with performance and assert that this combination leads to the phenomenon of subjective overachievement. In two studies, we present a new

The authors examined how the extent to which counterstereotypic individuals deviate from perceivers' stereotypes affects their impact on these stereotypes and found that extremely deviant group members provoke less stereotype assimilation than do moderately deviant ones. Extremely deviant examples can even provoke boomerang effects, that is, enhance the very stereotype that they violate. When participants whose prior stereotype were moderate or extreme were exposed to moderately or extremely deviant examples, the deviant examples' impact on stereotypes depended both on their extremity and on the extremity of perceivers' prior stereotypes. Boomerang effects were obtained only for extreme-stereotype participants exposed to extremely deviant examples and were mediated by perceptions of the typicality of the deviant examples. Open-ended explanations revealed that the atypicality of extremely deviant examples was used as grounds for dismissing them.

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This article suggests that undergraduate research can help advance the science of psychology. We introduce a hypothetical "question-list paradigm" as a mechanism to do this. Each year, thousands of undergraduate projects are completed as part of the educational experience. Although many of these studies may not contain sufficient contributions for publication, they provide a good test of the replicability of established findings across populations at different institutions and geographic locations. Thus, these projects could meet the needs of recent calls for increased replications of psychological studies while simultaneously benefiting the student researchers, their instructors, and the field in general.