An experiment examined the hypothesis that elderly people rely on stereotypes more, and are more prejudiced, than younger people because of deficits in the ability to inhibit information. Consistent with predictions, elderly people relied on stereotypes even when instructed not to, whereas young people did not. Elderly people also were more prejudiced than young people, and these differences in stereotyping and prejudice were mediated by age differences in inhibitory ability. Because elderly people reported a stronger desire than young people to control their prejudiced reactions, these results suggest that inhibitory failure can cause people to become more prejudiced than they want to be.

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

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In a number of domains, humans adopt a strategy of systematically reducing and minimizing a codified system of movement. One particularly interesting case is "marking" in dance, wherein the dancer performs an attenuated version of the choreography during rehearsal. This is ostensibly to save the dancer's physical energy, but a number of considerations suggest that it may serve a cognitive function as well. In this study, we tested this embodied-cognitive-load hypothesis by manipulating whether dancers rehearsed by marking or by dancing "full out" and found that performance was superior in the dancers who had marked. This finding indicates that marking confers cognitive benefits during the rehearsal process, and it raises questions regarding the cognitive functions of other movement-reduction systems, such as whispering, gesturing, and subvocalizing. In addition, it has implications for a variety of topics in cognitive science, including embodied cognition and the nascent fields of dance and music cognition.