Stereotyping and prejudice : revisiting Hamilton and Gifford's illusory correlation studies

Social psychology in the 1970s developed a powerful new cognitive paradigm. Studies of social influence, attitude change and group dynamics had dominated the field for the preceding 20 years (as illustrated by the studies discussed in Chapters 3 to 9). Even though social psychology had always studied mental life, and had avoided the behaviourist domination of experimental psychology that had seen the near banishment of the study of mental phenomena from the psychological laboratory, in the late 1960s and early 1970s a new approach that became known as cognitive psychology was starting to dominate psychology. Many cognitive psychologists were armed with the metaphor of the person as a faulty information processing device and this idea was imported into social psychology in the 1970s. This metaphor implied that as people processed information about the world around them, they made a series of errors (in particular, because they had limited processing capacity) and these had a range of unintended and unfortunate consequences.