Egalitarian self-presentation conceals the true relationship between prejudice and bias

Evidence

Concerns about appearing egalitarian, however, may interfere with the ability to detect a relationship between levels of prejudice and expression of racial bias (e.g., Sommers & Ellsworth, 2000; 2001). Yet the watchdog effect suggests that a more thorough evaluation of evidence for a stigmatized target only occurs for low prejudice individuals (Fleming et al., 2005). — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 876

Categorization

• XREF: Directly bears on the reader’s central question of whether professed egalitarian conviction predicts actual measured bias; the watchdog effect suggests low-prejudice individuals genuinely scrutinize stigmatized targets more, contradicting pure impression-management accounts.
• QUESTION: The watchdog effect appears to complicate the general conclusion that self-reported low prejudice merely masks bias — worth chasing how it squares with the implicit-explicit gap literature.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law: A Definitive Look at…, 876