Linville And Jones

Linville and Jones research is grounded on the cognitive approach in the formation and maintenance of stereotypes. Their experiments were designed to specifically investigate social cognition through attributional and polarized perspective. The attributional perspective consists of the augmentation and discounting principles which generated two different hypothesis, while the polarized perspective construed a different hypothesis. In the first experiment white male and female subjects were required to read and evaluate portions of three law school applications that contained information about the applicant’s race and sex. Results showed that black applicants of either sexes with high credentials were favored more than their white counterparts. These results is supported by the augmentation principle, which attributes higher abilities to the black applicants based on the assumption that the black applicants were to succeed in spite of the greater obstacles they experienced. In the second experiment, the design was modified to include applicants with weak credentials while everything else remained the same. Results revealed that the in-group members (the
This assumption states that a greater schematic complexity would lead to less extreme evaluations. Subjects read and evaluated three law school application essays, the third essay was either strong or weak. Subjects were randomly assigned to think of the essays based on either six or two dimensions. When the essay was strong, subjects with two dimensional schema rated it more favorably than subjects with six dimensional schema. When the essay was weak, subjects with two dimensional schema rated it less favorably than subjects with a six dimensional schema. Meaning that people tend to make moderate judgements regarding in-group members than out-group members because they have a larger understanding of the