Low-prejudice people reduce automatic bias by learning to associate failures with guilt and self-regulation
Evidence
Monteith and her colleagues (Monteith, 1993; Monteith, Ashburn-Nardo, Voils, & Czopp, 2002) argued that low-prejudice people learn to overcome their automatic prejudiced tendencies through self-regulatory outcomes that follow from an awareness of the failure to control stereotyping or prejudice. Specifically, this program of research has revealed that awareness of a prejudiced response elicits not only guilt but other outcomes that enable low-prejudice people to exert control over future, potentially prejudiced responses. These other outcomes include heightened self-focus, a momentary disruption of ongoing behavior coupled with retrospective reflection on why the failure occurred, and careful attention to the stimuli or cues present when the failure occurred. Learning to associate a prejudice-related failure with guilt and self-regulatory mechanisms establishes cues for control (Monteith et al., 2002). When these cues are present in future situations, they lead to an immediate interruption in ongoing behavior and prospective reflection, which leads to response slowing and a careful consideration of how to respond with the goal of preventing a prejudiced response. This work is important because it provides a theoretical account of how controlled processes may be recruited to disrupt automatic processes in the presence of cues for control such that prejudiced responses are prevented and replaced with egalitarian responses. — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 2109
Categorization
- XREF: Runs parallel to the vault’s existing contact-theory and prejudice-psychology claims about how egalitarian-selected people override bias; provides the control-side mechanism complementing intergroup-contact exposure effects. — connects to: Cognitive biases are hardwired parts of human brains rather than avoidable mistakes. — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 115
- DEFINE: Introduces cues for control as the mechanism by which guilt-linked failures recruit controlled processing against automatic prejudice.