Describe three mechanisms that help explain why stereotypes persist even when people are presented with stereotype-inconsistent information

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Illusory correlation is one mechanism that can lead to the maintenance of stereotypes
even in the presence of disconfirming information. It results from the tendency of
people to see a relationship between infrequent events and negative events. People
tend to think that groups that are in the minority are more likely to engage in infrequent
acts. Because stereotypes are often about minority groups and because negative
events are usually infrequent, illusory correlation can lead to the maintenance of
negative evaluations of minority groups. A second mechanism is sub typing, the process
whereby people refine a stereotype to include inconsistent individual members of a
group while maintaining the overall negative evaluation of the group. Throughout this
process, although evaluations of an individual member may not be consistent with the
stereotype, evaluations of the group remain the same. A third mechanism is the
confirmation bias, which causes people to seek out and pay more attention to
stereotype-consistent information than to stereotype-inconsistent information.
Confirmation biases lead people to discount information that is inconsistent with the
stereotype, to interpret ambiguous information in an expectation-consistent manner, and
even to elicit behavior that confirms their expectations.