The Influence of Feature Salience and Personality Traits on Implicit Stereotype Formation

Abstract The formation of stereotypes is fundamentally a cognitive process rooted in efficiency. While personality traits such as the ones in the Big Five and the Dark Tetrad are known predictors of prejudiced behavior, their influence on the initial formation of stereotypes remains unclear. This study investigated whether individual differences in personality and social attitudes influence stereotype formation during early cognitive processing. Using a modified version of the Martin et al. (2014) study, 158 participants learned to associate attributes with fictional "alien" characters across varying conditions of feature overlap (colour, shape, no overlap). It was hypothesised that traits like Openness to Experience and Agreeableness would inhibit, whereas Dark Tetrad traits would facilitate stereotype formation. The results demonstrated a clear learning effect: participants successfully developed stereotypes, as seen by increased accuracy and reduced trait variability over time. Specifically, the strongest stereotyping occurred in the colour overlap condition. However, contrary to hypotheses, no significant correlations were found between stereotype formation and any of the personality measures (Big Five, Dark Tetrad) or social attitudes (RWA, SDO). These findings suggest that stereotype formation in this context functions as a “strong situation,” where the brain’s demand for efficiency and reliance on salient visual cues overrides individual personality differences. However, future research should use more diverse samples to determine if this cognitive dominance holds outside of homogeneous groups like the one in this sample.