Surprised Elaboration

We reveal a new consequence of stereotypes: they affect the length of communications. People say more about events that violate (vs. confirm) common stereotypes, because they find the former more surprising, a phenomenon we call surprised elaboration. Across two public datasets (Study 1), government officials wrote longer reports when negative events befell white people (stereotype-inconsistent) than when the same events befell Black or Hispanic people (stereotype-consistent). Officers authored longer missing child reports of white (vs. Black or Hispanic) children (Study 1a), and medical examiners wrote longer reports of unidentified white (vs. Black or Hispanic) bodies (Study 1b). In follow-up experiments, stereotype-inconsistent events caused greater elaboration because they were more surprising (Study 2), which prompted communicators to elaborate for both positive and negative events (Study 3). Finally, we documented policy implications. Observers wanted to funnel government and media resources towards cases with longer reports (i.e., those featuring white vs. Black or Hispanic victims), even when longer reports were not more informative (Studies 4-6). Together, these studies introduce surprised elaboration, a new theoretical phenomenon with implications for public policy.