When stereotype disconfirmation is a personal threat: How prejudice and prevention focus moderate incongruency effects

For people with a prevention focus, stereotype disconfirmation is a threat to efficient and effective self-regulation when the disconfirmation is discrepant from stereotypic beliefs they endorse. This produces negative emotions, vigilance motivation, and higher attention to both the disconfirming target and its background location. Within a typical person memory paradigm, participants had to form an impression about a target person who was either male or female and was described by gender-stereotype congruent, incongruent, and irrelevant attributes. Later, they were asked to recollect the information in a background-sensitive recognition test. Participants' regulatory focus strength and modern sexism were assessed. As predicted, the higher the combination of both prevention focus and prejudice the better the memory for both the target and its background information for incongruent items. In addition, the higher this combination, the more intense were agitation-related emotions (i.e., worry and tension), and the stronger was the desire to meet the person. Implications for both the person memory and stereotype literatures are discussed.