Discrimination and the Implicit Association Test

Prejudice researchers have been criticized for failing to assess behaviors that reflect overtly hostile actions (i.e. racial animus; Arkes & Tetlock, 2004; Mackie & Smith, 1998). Two studies sought to begin to fill this gap in the implicit literature by showing that scores on the Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998) are linked to harmful intergroup behaviors. In Study 1, the IAT predicted self-reported racial discrimination, including verbal slurs, exclusion, and physical harm. In Study 2, the IAT predicted recommended budget cuts for Jewish, Asian, and Black student organizations (i.e. economic discrimination). In each study, evaluative stereotype (but not attitude) IATs predicted behaviors even after controlling for explicit attitudes. In concert, the findings suggest that implicit stereotypes are more predictive of overtly harmful actions than implicit attitudes in the intergroup relations domain

Sources of implicit attitudes.

have a negative evaluation of smoking derived from your childhood experiences. Indeed, the explosion of interest in implicit attitudes rests on the fact that welllearned attitudes are accessed automatically (i.e., without effort or control) in the presence of attitude objects. A third possibility-and the hypothesis tested by this research-is that your explicit, self-reported attitude will stem largely from recent experiences (and therefore be positive), whereas your implicit attitude will be influenced by your childhood experiences with smoking (and therefore be negative). If your explicit and implicit attitudes have disparate sources, we would not expect them to covary or even to share the same valence IMPLICIT AND EXPLICIT ATTITUDES Operationally, response latency (implicit) measures assume that performing tasks in which responses and attitudes are congruent (i.e., well associated) is easier than performing tasks in which responses and attitudes are incongruent. Because latency judgments do not depen

How I Came to be a Prejudice Researcher

autobiographical essay accompanying Chapter

Self-promotion as a risk factor for women: The costs and benefits of counterstereotypical impression management.

managing a competent impression, yet women who self-promote may suffer social reprisals for violating gender prescriptions to be modest. Experiment 1 investigated the influence of perceivers' goals on processes that inhibit stereotypical thinking, and reactions to counterstereotypical behavior. Experiments 2- 3 extended these findings by including male targets. For female targets, self-promotion led to higher competence ratings but incurred social attraction and hireability costs unless perceivers were outcome-dependent males. For male targets, self-effacement decreased competence and hireabil-ity ratings, though its effects on social attraction were inconsistent. Self-promotion appears prominently in any taxonomy of im-pression-management (IM) strategies (e.g., Jones & Pittman, 1982). Designed to augment one's status and attractiveness, self-promotion includes pointing with pride to one's accom-plishments, speaking directly about one's strengths and talents, and making internal rather than external attributions for achieve-ments. It is especially useful in situations in which the self-enhancer is not well-known or is competing against others for scarce resources (e.g., during a job interview). Not surprisingly, self-promotional skills are positively related to hiring and pro-motion decisions, perhaps because they are associated with qual-ities considered prerequisites for many occupations (e.g., com-petence, confidence, and ambition; e.g., Kacmar, Delery, &amp