Various studies demonstrated that a situation’s similarity with a person’s prototype of discrimination vastly influences this person’s perceived discrimination (prototype-effect [PE]; Baron et al., 1991). Even though PE seems to be one of the best investigated and robust effects in the field, underlying psychological processes remained mainly unclear. The most prominent explanatory approach describes prototypes as anticipatory beliefs, that shape expectations about discrimination equivalent to representative heuristics (Inman & Baron, 1996; Kahneman & Frederick, 2002). in contrast, Rodin and colleagues (1996) assumed judgments of discrimination to correspond with attribution of blame processes. Based on this view, PE would occur because prototypical discrimination was seen as more morally reprehensible. The aim of the present line of study was to investigate PE in systemic discrimination and to disentangle the two explanatory approaches.
In the first (summarized information presentation; N=38) and second experiment (sequential presentation; N=72) PE was replicated for systemic discrimination. The third experiment (N=172) presented either high or low severity of discrimination. The interaction of severity and prototypicality was theorized to be an indication of moral processes but did not reach significance. In the fourth experiment (N=220), morality and expectation were induced either before or after information sampling. Both concepts were manipulated orthogonally by using non-human stimuli. The main effect of expectation reached significance, while main effects of morality and presentation order as well as their interactions did not. Summarized, while PE seems to be a robust effect, only support for expectation as a driving force of PE has been found.