Adopting egalitarian beliefs does not erase automatically activated cultural stereotypes

Evidence

In developing an analysis of how nonprejudiced beliefs and prejudiced thoughts may coexist within the same individual, Devine’s (1989) dissociation model of prejudice drew on the distinction between automatic and controlled cognitive processes. My goal was to provide a theoretical analysis of how those who sincerely renounce prejudice may remain vulnerable to unintentional activation of stereotyped thoughts and prejudiced feelings. To do so, I recast Allport’s “internal conflict” as reflecting a struggle between automatic and controlled processes. According to the model, whether people are consciously prejudiced or not, they are vulnerable to the automatic activation of the cultural stereotype of African Americans. This type of automatic stereotype activation is a legacy of our common socialization experiences and occurs without people’s consent or bidding. The model assumes that adoption of nonprejudiced beliefs or values does not immediately eliminate automatic prejudiced responses. Importantly, the model does not presume that people who adopt egalitarian values hide from or deny automatic biases; instead, the biases are recognized, viewed as unacceptable, and motivate corrective efforts. Provided low-prejudice people have sufficient time and cognitive resources available, they will use controlled processes to censor automatic processes and respond on the basis of their nonprejudiced beliefs. — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 2102

Categorization

• XREF: Directly grounds the vault’s claim that verbal attitude reports diverge from covert prejudice indicators; connects to existing contact-theory claims about aversive racism. — connects to: Paternalistic low-competence, high-warmth stereotypes predate modern egalitarian norms — Susan T. Fiske et al., A Model of (Often Mixed) Stereotype…, 34
• DEFINE: Defines the dissociation model and its automatic-versus-controlled-process framing.
• ADDENDUM: Supports the prejudice-psychology reassessment thread as core empirical grounding.