Hamilton & Rose (1980)

• Overview - Hamilton & Rose investigated how illusory correlations contribute to the maintenance of social stereotypes.
• Results - All the studies revealed systematic biases in the participants’ judgements, in that the perceived correlation between traits and occupations was more congruent/similar with existing stereotypical beliefs.
• Concluded that when two infrequent events occur together, illusory correlations are triggered due to the heightened attention observers pay to them (they're encoded better).
• Hamilton and Rose performed three experiments.

  1. Participants read sets of sentences describing different occupations with adjective pairs like doctors (thoughtful and wealthy), salesmen (enthusiastic and talkative), or nonstereotypical traits like boring and demanding.
  2. Participants read sets of sentences with adjective pairs that were either consistent with the stereotypes or unrelated to them.
  3. The adjectives were either inconsistent or unrelated.
  4. Participants then estimated how often each of the trait adjectives accurately described the members of the occupational group.