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The primary aim of the present research was to examine the effect of training in negating stereotype associations on stereotype activation. Across 3 studies, participants received practice in negating stereotypes related to skinhead and racial categories. The subsequent automatic activation of stereotypes was measured using either a primed Stroop task (Studies 1 and 2) or a person categorization task (Study 3). The results demonstrate that when receiving no training or training in a nontarget category stereotype, participants exhibited spontaneous stereotype activation. After receiving an extensive amount of training related to a specific category, however, participants demonstrated reduced stereotype activation. The results from the training task provide further evidence for the impact of practice on participants’ proficiency in negating stereotypes.

Social categorization has often been shown to have a close (Dovidio, Evans, & Tyler, 1986) and automatic (Bargh, 1997) tie with what people see and how they judge others. Specifically, mere exposure to a category representation, whether it be an actual category member, a photograph of a category exemplar, or a written category label, may be sufficient for stereotyping to occur, often regardless of intention or awareness (Bargh, 1996). Recent studies have demonstrated that stereotyping related to such categories as race (Devine, 1989; Dovidio, Kawakami, Johnson, Johnson, & Howard, 1997), sex (Blair & Banaji, 1996; Macrae, Bodenhausen, & Milne, 1995; Moskowitz, Gollwitzer, Wasel, & Schaal, 1999), and age (Hense, Penner, & Nelson, 1995) is largely automatic. The present research further...