The degree of agreement among the students in assigning characteristics from a list of 84 adjectives to different races seemed too great to be the result solely of the students' contacts with members of those races. Individual experience may have entered into a student's judgment, but it probably did so to confirm the original stereotype which he had learned. Because human beings from time to time exhibit all kinds of behavior he could find confirmation of his views. By omitting cases which contradict the stereotype, the individual becomes convinced from association with a race that its members are just the kind of people he always thought they were. The manner in which public and private attitudes are bound up together was shown in the order of the 10 racial and national groups as determined by the definiteness with which students assigned characteristics to them. The definiteness of the stereotyped picture of a race, however, had little relation to the prejudice exhibited against that race. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved)