Automatic race stereotypes operate regardless of self-reported prejudice

Evidence

A landmark study demonstrated that people make preconscious, automatic stereotypic associations to race categories (Devine, 1989). Whites subliminally primed with black stereotypic words (black, lazy, athletic) subsequently rated a race-neutral person, who behaved ambiguously, as more (stereotypically) hostile, regardless of self-reported prejudice. The now widelyused Implicit Associations Test complements these results (for a review, see Greenwald et al., 2002). The IAT pairs category-relevant cues (e.g., stereotypically black or white names, black or white faces) with positive and negative terms. People more rapidly associate positive terms with higher-status groups (and sometimes ingroups) but more negative terms with lower-status groups (and sometimes outgroups). — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice, 298

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: The claim that subliminal stereotype priming works even in low-prejudice people connects to the broader literature on implicit bias and to Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink.
• SEED: Angle: the gap between self-reported egalitarianism and automatic association is a rich seam for an essay on how good intentions fail at the level of milliseconds.

Related

• Subliminal racial priming shifts judgments even among people low in prejudice (similarity 0.94)
• Automatic stereotypic associations operate preconsciously and independently of self-reported prejudice (similarity 0.92)
• Subliminal stereotype priming raises hostility judgments regardless of stated prejudice. (similarity 0.86)
• Implicit stereotypes are controllable and shaped by context (similarity 0.81)
• Strong race-aggression associations and rapid racial categorization are well documented. (similarity 0.80)
• Early implicit priming results were open to alternative non-stereotype explanations. (similarity 0.79)
• Category primes speed stereotypic word decisions automatically (similarity 0.79)
• Prejudice and stereotypes can operate implicitly without perceivers’ awareness (similarity 0.78)