Prejudice-prone people can train themselves to interrupt automatic biased responses
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. Across a number of experiments, Monteith and colleagues have provided compelling evidence that low-prejudice people can effectively learn to “put the brakes on their prejudices” (see also Kawakami et al., 2000). — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice, 2109
Categorization
- QUESTION: The explicit learning loop — guilt as a conditioned cue that triggers braking — parallels habit-formation research; worth chasing how this generalizes beyond prejudice to other automatic biases.
- XREF: Echoes the behavioral economics work on commitment devices and the Milgrom law-merchant reputation research: internal control cues function like institutional ‘brakes’ on automatic behavior.