Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2025
Publication Title
Journal of Experimental Political Science
Keywords
stereotypes, ordering effect, race
Abstract
Stereotypes about groups are commonly measured by asking participants to rate the groups on a scale. However, the percentage of participants who stereotype a group can be affected by the order in which participants are asked to rate the groups. Data from a randomized experiment in the American National Election Studies 2022 Pilot Study indicated that a group was more frequently positively stereotyped relative to another group when the group was asked about first in the pair of groups, compared to when the other group in the pair was asked about first. Researchers are therefore advised to randomize the order of groups in a stereotype battery to evenly spread this ordering effect across groups and are also advised to design stereotype items to minimize this ordering effect.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
DOI
10.1017/XPS.2025.10026
Recommended Citation
Zigerell, L. J. (2025). Ordering Effects in Stereotype Scales. Journal of Experimental Political Science, 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1017/XPS.2025.10026
Comments
First published in Journal of Experimental Political Science (2025): https://doi.org/10.1017/XPS.2025.10026.
Data and code to replicate all analyses in this article are available at the Journal of Experimental Political Science Dataverse (Zigerell 2025) within the Harvard Dataverse Network at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/FYGUWO.