Biased Mind or Biased World? Assessing the Accuracy of Cultural Beliefs that Underlie Social Judgments

Societal expectations have been found to determine which social roles people should occupy. However, so far, these beliefs have been mainly explored using implicit measures where expectation-confirming (vs. violating) judgments tend to be more efficient. The present study (N = 44) applied a novel approach – the random generation paradigm – to explore how pre-existing social assumptions determine which information is retrieved from memory when prompted by different social categories. Specifically, we asked participants to imagine people working in certain professions and to say their names out loud. We found that the statistics of the uttered names reflected societal gender stereotypes and environmental statistics of actual people working in these occupations. Importantly, the proportion of female and male names generated for each profession by each participant predicted their performance in a sequential priming task (prime = stereotyped professions, target = female and male faces) better than the environmental statistics or participants’ explicit estimates of gender proportions. Together, these findings offer a new, and widely applicable, method for exploring cultural beliefs and help clarify how social information is sampled from memory when making social judgments.