My research seeks to understand stereotyping and prejudice, with a primary focus on the cognitive processes that contribute to the earliest stages of stereotyping. My collaborators and I have shown that those processes are not as simple as scientists once thought. For example, even though stereotypes can be automatically activated and influence a variety of outcomes, we have provided multiple demonstrations that such activation is not impervious to the perceiver's conscious expectations and strategies. Indeed there is growing evidence that automatic group attitudes, in general, are malleable and sensitive to variations in the perceiver's context.

Most recently, we have begun a new line of work to investigate the manner in which a target's physical features are used to make stereotypic judgments. In accordance with traditional models of stereotyping, we have shown that African Americans who can be more easily categorized as group members on the basis of their physical features, are more likely to be judged as having stereotypic traits. We have also shown, however, that those same features may directly activate the stereotype and lead to more stereotypic judgments, over and above those resulting from categorization. Based on this and other evidence, we have begun to develop a model of the manner in which physical features may become directly associated with stereotypic traits, leading to the generalization of stereotypes from category-based to feature-based associations.

Primary Interests:

Attitudes and Beliefs
Culture and Ethnicity
Intergroup Relations
Interpersonal Processes
Person Perception
Prejudice and Stereotyping
Social Cognition

Attitudes and Beliefs
Culture and Ethnicity
Intergroup Relations
Interpersonal Processes

Person Perception
Prejudice and Stereotyping
Social Cognition

Research Group or Laboratory:

CU Stereotyping and Prejudice Laboratory (CUSP)
Interactive Map

Journal Articles:

Blair, I. V. (2002). The malleability of automatic stereotypes and prejudice. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 6, 242-261.
Blair, I. V., & Banaji, M. R. (1996). Automatic and controlled processes in stereotype priming. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70, 1142-1163.
Blair, I. V., Chapleau, K. M., & Judd, C. M. (2004). The use of Afrocentric features as cues for judgment in the presence of diagnostic information. European Journal of Social Psychology, 34, 1-10.
Blair, I. V., & Jost, J. T. (2003). Exit, loyalty, and collective action among workers in a simulated business environment: Interactive effects of group identification and boundary permeability. Social Justice Research, 16, 95-108.
Blair, I. V., Judd, C. M., & Chapleau, K. M. (2004). The influence of Afrocentric facial features in criminal sentencing. Psychological Science, 15, 674-679.
Blair, I. V., Judd, C. M., & Fallman, J. L. (2004). The automaticity of race and Afrocentric facial features in social judgments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87, 763-778.
Blair, I. V., Ma, J. E., & Lenton, A. P. (2001). Imagining stereotypes away: The moderation of implicit stereotypes through mental imagery. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 828-841.
Judd, C. M., Blair, I. V., & Chapleau, K. M. (2004). Automatic stereotypes versus automatic prejudice: Sorting out the possibilities in the Payne (2002) weapon paradigm. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 40, 75-81.
Lenton, A. P., Blair, I. V., & Hastie, R. (2001). Illusions of gender: Stereotypes evoke false memories. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 37, 3-14.

Other Publications:

Devine, P. G., Plant, E.A., & Blair, I. V. (2001). Classic and contemporary analyses of racial prejudice (pp. 198-217). In R. Brown and S. Gaertner (Eds.), Handbook of social psychology: Intergroup processes. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Courses Taught:

Irene V. Blair
Department of Psychology and Neuroscience
University of Colorado at Boulder
Campus Box 345
Boulder, CO 80309-0345
United States

Phone: (303) 492-4563
Fax: (303) 492-2967