Stereotypes, and other forms of heuristics, are used in our everyday lives to assist our brains absorb information. An argument is made here to show that values can act as a form of heuristics and affect implicit attitudes. Drawing on research regarding implicit attitudes, heuristics, and values, we believe that values, such as equality, can act as a heuristic and consequently alter implicit attitudes on race. In this experiment, participants were primed with equality, intuition, or a stereotype inhibition prompt and ran through the affect misattribution procedure (AMP). Contrary to the hypothesized expectation, the results showed that participants in the equality condition rated pictographs preceding African-American faces as less pleasant compared to Caucasian faces. It is discussed whether these findings represent the results of moral licensing: participants who were instructed to think about the value of equality might have felt less of a need to regulate their bias in the AMP. This study displays the variety of ways heuristics affect decision-making
