Black Men Get Shorter Sentences: Narrative Elaboration Reveals Incoming Stereotypes

We find that people engage in motivated elaboration: they are more motivated to process and elaborate upon stereotype-inconsistent events (that surprise them) than stereotype-consistent events (that are less surprising). Across two legal, publically available datasets (Study 1), people elaborated more—they wrote more words—when describing negative outcomes for Whites (versus minorities), which are more stereotype inconsistent. Specifically, national organizations authored longer descriptions of missing children (N = 1,131 children) when the children were White (vs. minority), and medical examiners wrote longer descriptions of unidentified White (vs. minority) bodies (N = 1,194 bodies). In follow-up experiments (N = 913), the degree to which people found events surprising accounted for the length of their elaboration, whereas other considerations (i.e., the desire to provide majority members with better service) did not (Study 2). Why does motivated elaboration matter? People invest more resources in cases accompanied by more elaborated information (Study 3), suggesting that over time, inequalities mount: counter-stereotypical events, which are information-rich, get richer. Taken together, these findings suggest that narrative elaboration contains traces of societal stereotypes. As a result, text length may be a new tool for revealing peoples’ biases—which are notoriously hard to measure—in a very public way.