The motivation to form a particular impression of an individual can prompt the inhibition of applicable stereotypes that contradict one's desired impression and the activation and application of stereotypes that support it. Participants, especially those high in prejudice, inhibited the Black stereotype when motivated to esteem a Black individual (because he had praised them). Participants motivated to esteem a Black doctor also activated the doctor stereotype. In contrast, participants motivated to disparage a Black doctor (because he had criticized them) inhibited the doctor stereotype. Participants motivated to disparage a Black individual also applied the Black stereotype to him, rating him as relatively incompetent. All these effects were driven by the self-protective motives of recipients of feedback from Black evaluators; detached observers showed no such effects.Imagine a student whose work has just received glowing praise from a Black professor. Most students would want to revel in such praise and make the most of its self-enhancing potential. This may be difficult to do, however, if the student happens to subscribe to the negative stereotype of African Americans that can challenge the competence of this Black professor; how can one take any praise seriously if one considers the person who delivered it incompetent? We propose that to resolve this dilemma, the student may push the negative stereotype of African Americans out of mind, thereby preventing it from casting doubts over this professor's competence. Furthermore, to alleviate any lingering doubts, the student may seek to boost the professor's likely competence by focusing on an alternative, positive stereotype that also is applicable: that of professors. Imagine, on the other hand, a student whose work has been harshly criticized by the same Black professor. A wealth of social-

The degree to which an individual perceives interpersonal acceptance as being contingent on successes and failures, versus relatively unconditional, is an important factor in the social construction of self-esteem. The authors used a lexical-decision task to examine people's "if... then" expectancies. On each trial, participants were shown a success or failure context word and then they made a word-nonword judgment on a second letter string, which sometimes was a target word relating to interpersonal outcomes. For low-self-esteem participants, success and failure contexts facilitated the processing of acceptance and rejection target words, respectively, revealing associations between performance and social outcomes. Study 2 ruled out a simple valence-congruency explanation. Study 3 demonstrated that the reaction-time pattern was stronger for people who had recently been primed with a highly contingent relationship, as opposed to one based more on unconditional acceptance. These results contribute to a social-cognitive formulation of the role of relational schemas in the social construction of self-esteem.

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Motivation may provoke stereotype use. In a field study of students' evaluations of university instructors and in a controlled experiment, participants viewed women as less competent than men after receiving negative evaluations from them but not after receiving positive evaluations. As a result, the evaluation of women depended more on the favorability of the feedback they provided than was the case for men. Most likely, this occurred because the motivation of criticized participants to salvage their self-views by disparaging their evaluator led them to use a stereotype that they would otherwise not have used. The stereotype was not used by participants praised by a woman or by participants who observed someone else receive praise or criticism from a woman; all these participants rated the woman just as highly as participants rated a man delivering comparable feedback.

The same trait may imply different behaviors when applied to members of differently stereotyped groups. For example, these studies show that aggressive connotes physical violence when applied to a construction worker but verbal abuse when applied to a lawyer. Such stereotype-driven construals of traits can be more readily explained by a parallel-constraint-satisfaction model of impression formation (Z. Kunda & P. Thagard, 1996) than by more traditional models of representation commonly used by social psychologists. These studies show also that stereotypes affect predictions about a person's trait-related behavior even after the stereotype's impact on the trait itself has been undermined by individuating information about that person. The parallel-constraint-satisfaction model is better able to account for such a pattern than are earlier, serial models of stereotype use.