One potential strategy for prejudice reduction is encouraging people to acknowledge, and take ownership for, their implicit biases. Across two studies, we explore how taking ownership for implicit racial bias affects the subsequent expression of overt bias. Participants first completed an implicit measure of their attitudes toward Black people. Then we either led participants to think of their implicit bias as their own or as stemming from external factors. Results revealed that taking ownership for high implicit racial bias had diverging effects on subsequent warmth toward Black people (Study 1) and donations to a Black nonprofit (Study 2) based on people’s internal motivations to respond without prejudice (Internal Motivation Scale [IMS]). Critically, among those low in IMS, owning high implicit bias backfired, leading to greater overt prejudice and smaller donations. We conclude that taking ownership of implicit bias has mixed outcomes—at times amplifying the expression of explicit prejudice.
AjzenI. (2001). Nature and operation of attitudes. Annual Review of Psychology, 52, 27-58.
2.
AndreychikM. R.GillM. J. (2012). Do negative implicit associations indicate negative attitudes? Social explanations moderate whether ostensible “negative” associations are prejudice-based or empathy-based. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48, 1082-1093.
3.
BaumeisterR. F.StillwellA. M.HeathertonT. F. (1994). Guilt: An interpersonal approach. Psychological Bulletin, 115, 243-267.
4.
CameronC. D.Brown-IannuzziJ. L.PayneB. K. (2012). Sequential priming measures of implicit social cognition: A meta-analysis of associations with behavior and explicit attitudes. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 16, 330-350.
5.
CooleyE.PayneB. K.LoerschC.LeiR. (2015). Who owns implicit attitudes? Testing a metacognitive perspective. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 41, 103-115.
6.
CooleyE.PayneB. K.PhillipsK. J. (2014). Implicit bias and the illusion of conscious ill will. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 5, 500-507.
7.
CrandallC. S.EshlemanA. (2003). A justification-suppression model of the expression and experience of prejudice. Psychological Bulletin, 129, 414-446.
8.
De HoogeI. E.NelissenR.BreugelmansS. M.ZeelenbergM. (2011). What is moral about guilt? Acting “prosocially” at the disadvantage of others. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100, 462-473.
9.
DevineP. G. (1989). Stereotypes and prejudice: Their automatic and controlled components. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 56, 5-18.
10.
DevineP. G.ForscherP. S.AustinA. J.CoxW. T. (2012). Long-term reduction in implicit race bias: A prejudice habit-breaking intervention. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48, 1267-1278.
11.
DevineP. G.MonteithM. J.ZuwerinkJ. R.ElliotA. J. (1991). Prejudice with and without compunction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60, 817-830.
12.
DevineP. G.PlantE. A.AmodioD. M.Harmon-JonesE.VanceS. L. (2002). The regulation of explicit and implicit race bias: The role of motivations to respond without prejudice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82, 835-848.
13.
DovidioJ. F.GaertnerS. L. (2004). Aversive racism. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 36, 4-56.
14.
DovidioJ. F.KawakamiK.GaertnerS. L. (2000). Reducing contemporary prejudice: Combating explicit and implicit bias at the individual and intergroup level. In OskampS. (Ed.), Reducing prejudice and discrimination (pp. 137-163). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
15.
DovidioJ. F.KawakamiK.GaertnerS. L. (2002). Implicit and explicit prejudice and interracial interaction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82, 62-68.
16.
FaulF.ErdfelderE.LangA. G.BuchnerA. (2007). G* Power 3: A flexible statistical power analysis program for the social, behavioral, and biomedical sciences. Behavior Research Methods, 39, 175-191.
17.
FazioR. H.JacksonJ. R.DuntonB. C.WilliamsC. J. (1995). Variability in automatic activation as an unobtrusive measure of racial attitudes: A bona fide pipeline?Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69, 1013-1027.
18.
FiskeS. T.CuddyA. J.GlickP.XuJ. (2002). A model of (often mixed) stereotype content: Competence and warmth respectively follow from perceived status and competition. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82, 878-902.
19.
ForscherP. S.LaiC.AxtJ.EbersoleC. R.HermanM.NosekB. A.DevineP. G. (under review). A meta-analysis of change in implicit bias.
20.
GawronskiB.BodenhausenG. V. (2007). Unraveling the processes underlying evaluation: Attitudes from the perspective of the APE model. Social Cognition, 25, 687-717.
21.
GawronskiB.HofmannW.WilburC. J. (2006). Are “implicit” attitudes unconscious?Consciousness and Cognition, 15, 485-499.
22.
GendlerT. S. (2011). On the epistemic costs of implicit bias. Philosophical Studies, 156, 33-63.
23.
GlasmanL. R.AlbarracínD. (2006). Forming attitudes that predict future behavior: A meta- analysis of the attitude-behavior relation. Psychological Bulletin, 132, 778-822.
24.
GohJ. X.HallJ. A.RosenthalR. (2016). Mini meta-analysis of your own studies: Some arguments on why and a primer on how. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 10, 535-549.
25.
GreenwaldA. G.BanajiM. R. (1995). Implicit social cognition: Attitudes, self-esteem, and stereotypes. Psychological Review, 102, 4-27.
26.
GreenwaldA. G.McGheeD. E.SchwartzJ. L. (1998). Measuring individual differences in implicit cognition: The implicit association test. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 1464-1480.
27.
HahnA.GawronskiB. (2014). Do implicit evaluations reflect unconscious attitudes?Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 37, 28-29. doi:10.1017/S0140525X13000721
28.
HahnA.JuddC. M.HirshH. K.BlairI. V. (2014). Awareness of implicit attitudes. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143, 1369-1392.
29.
HayesA. F. (2013). Introduction to mediation, moderation, and conditional process analysis: A regression-based approach. New York, NY: Guilford Press.
KarpinskiA.HiltonJ. L. (2001). Attitudes and the Implicit Association Test. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 774-788.
32.
LaiC. K.SkinnerA. L.CooleyE.MurrarS.BrauerM.DevosT.NosekB. A. (2016). Reducing implicit racial preferences: II. Intervention effectiveness across time. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 8, 1001-1016.
33.
MandelbaumE. (2016). Attitude, inference, association: On the propositional structure of implicit bias. Noûs, 50, 629-658.
34.
McCartyN.PooleK. T.RosenthalH. (2016). Polarized America: The dance of ideology and unequal riches. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
MonteithM. J.DevineP. G.ZuwerinkJ. R. (1993). Self-directed versus other-directed affect as a consequence of prejudice-related discrepancies. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64, 198-210.
37.
MonteithM. J.MarkA. Y. (2005). Changing one’s prejudiced ways: Awareness, affect, and self-regulation. European Review of Social Psychology, 16, 113-154.
38.
MonteithM. J.VoilsC. I. (1998). Proneness to prejudiced responses: Toward understanding the authenticity of self-reported discrepancies. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 901-916.
39.
OlsonM. A.FazioR. H. (2004). Reducing the influence of extrapersonal associations on the Implicit Association Test: Personalizing the IAT. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 86, 653-667.
40.
OlsonM. A.FazioR. H. (2008). Implicit and explicit measures of attitudes: The perspective of the MODE model. In PettyR. E.FazioR. H.BriñolP. (Eds.), Attitudes: Insights from the new implicit measures (pp. 19-63). New York, NY: Psychology Press.
41.
PayneB. K.BurkleyM. A.StokesM. B. (2008). Why do implicit and explicit attitude tests diverge? The role of structural fit. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94, 16-31.
42.
PayneB. K.ChengC. M.GovorunO.StewartB. D. (2005). An inkblot for attitudes: Affect misattribution as implicit measurement. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 89, 277-293.
43.
PettyR. E.BriñolP.DeMarreeK. G. (2007). The Meta–Cognitive Model (MCM) of attitudes: Implications for attitude measurement, change, and strength. Social Cognition, 25, 657-686.
PlantE. A.DevineP. G. (1998). Internal and external motivation to respond without prejudice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 811-832.
46.
SaucierD. A.MillerC. T.DoucetN. (2005). Differences in helping whites and blacks: A meta-analysis. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 9, 2-16.
47.
TankardM. E.PaluckE. L. (2017). The effect of a Supreme Court decision regarding gay marriage on social norms and personal attitudes. Psychological Science, 28, 1334-1344.
48.
UhlmannE. L.BrescollV. L.PaluckE. L. (2006). Are members of low status groups perceived as bad, or badly off? Egalitarian negative associations and automatic prejudice. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 42, 491-499.
49.
UhlmannE. L.PoehlmanT. A.NosekB. A. (2012). Automatic associations: Personal attitudes or cultural knowledge. In HansonJ. (Ed.), Ideology, psychology, and law (pp. 228-260). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
