Maintaining cultural stereotypes in the serial reproduction of narratives

Abstract

Recent social cognition research showed that the individual often recalls stereotype-inconsistent (SI) information better than stereotype-consistent (SC) information. By contrast, classical studies in social psychology suggest that SC information is retained well in the collective remembering where a number of individuals are involved in the reproduction of stories. In the present experiment, individual and collective remembering were examined. A story about a man and a woman who exhibited gender-stereotype-relevant behaviors was transmitted through five-person communication chains. Although participants in earlier positions of the chains reproduced SI information more than SC information un..