| Abstract: | This experiment investigated the effects of Internet advertisements on use of stereotypes during a judgment task. Participants read a crime scenario on a computer screen and were asked to sentence the defendant. For some, the defendant was Caucasian; while for others, the defendant was African American. Moreover, in some conditions, Internet ads appeared periodically throughout the task. For others, no such ads appeared. Results revealed a significant interaction between the presence of Internet ads and defendant race such that the African American, but not the Caucasian, defendant received a significantly longer sentence when ads were present than when they were not. These findings indicate that the presence of Internet ads might have triggered participants to rely more on heuristic processing. |
