Running head: REDUCING IMPLICIT PREJUDICE 1
Reducing Implicit Prejudice
Calvin K. Lai
Kelly M. Hoffman
Brian A. Nosek
University of Virginia
Word count: 5,001
Author’s Note: Correspondence concerning this article should be sent to Calvin Lai, Department
of Psychology, University of Virginia, P.O. Box 400400, Charlottesville, VA 22904. E-mail may
be sent to clai@virginia.edu.
Cite this article as:
Lai, C. K., Hoffman, K. M., & Nosek, B. A. (2013). Reducing implicit prejudice. Social and
Personality Psychology Compass, 7, 315-330.
REDUCING IMPLICIT PREJUDICE 2
Abstract
Implicit prejudices are social preferences that exist outside of conscious awareness or
conscious control. In this review, we summarize evidence for three mechanisms that influence
the expression of implicit prejudice: associative change, contextual change, and change in
control over implicit prejudice. We then review the evidence (or lack thereof) for answers to five
open issues in implicit prejudice reduction research: 1) what shows effectiveness in real-world
application; 2) what doesn’t work for implicit prejudice reduction; 3) what interventions produce
long-term changes in implicit prejudice; 4) measurement diversity in implicit prejudice reduction
research; and 5) the relationship between implicit prejudice and behavior. Addressing these
issues provide an agenda for clarifying the conditions and implications of reducing implicit
prejudice.
Abstract = 115 words
REDUCING IMPLICIT PREJUDICE 3
Reducing Implicit Prejudice
Gordon Allport memorably defined prejudice as a “feeling, favorable or unfavorable,
toward a person or thing, prior to, or not based on, actual experience” (Allport, 1954, p. 6). The
conceptualization of prejudice has evolved since with a focus on intergroup relations –
evaluations of others based on social categories such as race, ethnicity, gender, social class,
sexual orientation, nationality, religion, or disability (Brewer, 1999; Dovidio, Glick & Rudman,
2005; Tajfel, 1982; Yzerbyt & Demoulin, 2010). One important shift in the understanding of
prejudice was the recognition that the “feeling” need not be deliberate, intentional, endorsed, or
even available to conscious awareness (Banaji, Nosek, & Greenwald, 2004; Fazio, Jackson,
Dunton, & Williams, 1995; Greenwald & Banaji, 1995). People can have implicit prejudices –
feelings, favorable or unfavorable, toward groups that they do not endorse or even realize that
they possess (Gawronski & Payne, 2010; Nosek, Hawkins, & Frazier, 2011, 2012).
Implicit prejudice is distinct, but related to explicit prejudice (Nosek & Smyth, 2007).
For example, self-reported attitudes toward Blacks compared to Whites is moderately, positively
correlated with the Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998;
Nosek, Greenwald, & Banaji, 2007) measuring associations for the same racial groups (zero-
order correlation r ~ .30; latent variable correlation r ~ .45; see Nosek, 2007 for a review). But,
the strength of the relationship between implicit and explicit attitudes varies across social
categories, with age and disability attitudes eliciting particularly weak relationships (r’s < .15),
for example, and sexual orientation and political attitudes eliciting comparatively strong ones
(r’s > .45; Nosek, Smyth, et al., 2007). This variation may be explained in part by the social
pressures against holding negative attitudes toward some groups and how much people have
elaborated on those attitudes (Nosek, 2005). Further, implicit and explicit evaluations predict
behavior – jointly and independently (Greenwald, Poehlman, Uhlmann, & Banaji, 2009).
Finally, implicit and explicit evaluations are understood to be subject to distinct formative
experiences (Ranganath & Nosek, 2008; Ratliff & Nosek, 2011; Rydell & McConnell, 2006),
operate via distinct psychological mechanisms (De Houwer, Teige-Mocigemba, Spruyt, &
Moors, 2009), and, as a consequence, have distinct routes for change (Gawronski &
Bodenhausen, 2006).
One question of theoretical and practical interest is how to reduce implicit prejudices
(Dasgupta, 2009; Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006; Sritharan & Gawronski, 2010). There are
two driving factors of this research interest. The first is a basic research question: what are the
mechanisms for change in implicit prejudice? Here, the focus is on the independent variable –
manipulations designed to identify and isolate a single psychological process responsible for
change. The second is a practical research question: how can implicit prejudice be reduced?
Here, the focus is on the dependent variable – implicit prejudice, and how much it shifts as a
function of the intervention. In this review, we summarize the present evidence for mechanisms
of change and for practical effectiveness, and chart a path toward a comprehensive understanding
of reducing implicit prejudice and its influence on behavior.
Mechanisms for Reducing Implicit Prejudice
For this review, we organized interventions based on their presumed mechanism of
change: retraining the underlying associations, shifting the context of evaluation, and controlling
the activation or application of associations (Gawronski & Sritharan, 2010).
1
1
These do not commit to a particular mental model of how associations are represented and which
processes are involved. From a representational perspective (Petty & Brinol, 2006; Petty, Brinol, &
REDUCING IMPLICIT PREJUDICE 4
Retraining Associations
Evaluative conditioning. Implicit attitudes, of which implicit prejudice is a special case,
are understood to reflect associations between concepts (e.g., Black/White, old/young) and
evaluations (e.g., good/bad, smart/dumb; Greenwald et al., 2002). Perhaps the most direct
method to change implicit attitudes is evaluative conditioning (Bar-Anan, De Houwer, & Nosek,
2010; De Houwer, Thomas, & Baeyens, 2001; Karpinski & Hilton, 2001; Olson & Fazio, 2006).
Evaluative conditioning provides experience linking concepts with attributes that differ from
their preexisting attitudes to retrain or create alternative attitudes. For example, Olson and Fazio
(2006) briefly presented participants with positive images and words paired with Black faces,
and negative images and words paired with White faces. Exposure to these pairings reduced
implicit racial prejudice immediately, and this change persisted at a follow-up assessment two
days later.
The logic of retraining associations appears in other approaches as well. On the
assumption that people tend to approach things that are good and avoid things that are bad, a
computer exercise reduced implicit prejudice using 480 trials of initiating approach toward Black
faces and avoidance of White faces (Kawakami, Phills, Steele, & Dovidio, 2007; see also
Wennekers, Holland, Wigboldus, & Knippenberg, 2011). This change may have been due to the
self – a concept strongly associated with good (Greenwald et al., 2002) – becoming more
associated with the approached faces (Kawakami, Steele, Cifa, Phills, & Dovidio, 2008; Phills,
Kawakami, Tabi, Nadolny, & Inzlicht, 2011). Another approach is to practice responding “Yes”
to pairings of Black people with counterstereotypical words (e.g., “intelligent”; Kawakami,
Dovidio, Moll, Hermsen, & Russin, 2000). The complementary approach of saying “No” to
pairings of Black targets with stereotypical words does not appear to be effective, however
(Gawronski, Deutsch, Mbirkou, Seibt, & Strack, 2008). Negations require first representing the
association and then invalidating it; since invalidating an association requires additional
processing (Gilbert, Taforadi, & Malone, 1993), negations may be particularly difficult to
process implicitly (Gawronski et al., 2008).
Intergroup contact. Intergroup contact is the most well-studied means of reducing
explicit prejudice (Allport, 1954; Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006), and it also appears to reduce
implicit prejudice (Aberson, Porter, & Gaffney, 2008; Dasgupta & Rivera, 2008). Shook and
Fazio (2008), for instance, took advantage of a natural experiment of college roommate
assignments where White students were randomly assigned to live with a Black roommate or a
White roommate. After one semester, they found that Whites assigned to live with a Black
roommate exhibited less implicit prejudice than Whites assigned to live with a White roommate.
Notably, some evidence suggests that intergroup contact affects explicit and implicit
prejudice differently. Intergroup contact’s effect on explicit prejudice is mediated through
increased self-disclosure and reduced intergroup anxiety, suggesting that quality of contact is
important for reducing explicit prejudice. In contrast, the quantity of intergroup contact has a
direct effect on implicit prejudice, suggesting that mere exposure to outgroup members is
DeMarree, 2007; Wilson, Lindsey, & Schooler, 2000), these can be understood as changing the
association itself, shifting to related associations, or altering the expression of associations. From a
distributed network or connectionist perspective (Mitchell, Nosek, & Banaji, 2003; Monroe & Read,
2008; Smith, 1996, 2009; Conrey & Smith, 2007), these can be understood as changing the connection
weights in the network, altering the activated nodes, and altering the network output. Both perspectives
can be adapted to accommodate virtually any findings.
REDUCING IMPLICIT PREJUDICE 5
sufficient for reducing implicit prejudice (Tam, Hewstone, Harwood, Voci, & Kenworthy, 2006;
Turner, Hewstone, & Voci, 2007).
Persuasion. Persuasive appeals have been studied extensively for changing explicit
attitudes (Eagly & Chaiken, 1993; Petty & Wegener, 1998), but not implicit attitudes. One
exception found that an argument in favor of a policy about racial/ethnic issues that elicited high
cognitive elaboration reduced implicit prejudice relative to the same basic argument eliciting low
cognitive elaboration (Brinol, Petty, & McCaslin, 2009). Degree of cognitive elaboration may
influence implicit attitudes through deliberative reasoning, whereby newly-gained knowledge
leads to the activation of positive associations with attitude objects. Further, persuasion cues
such as personal relevance, source expertise, and source trustworthiness can influence the impact
of persuasive messages on implicit attitudes (Marini, Rubichi, & Sartori, 2012; Smith, De
Houwer, & Nosek, 2013), and theoretically, their influence on prejudice-relevant messages.
Shifting the Context
A common assumption of the associative changes reviewed in the prior section is that the
reductions in implicit prejudice are long-lasting. However, some manipulations may induce
temporary shifts by changing the social or emotional context. These shifts could have
considerable influence in the specific contexts in which they occur but fade rapidly.
Activating counterstereotypical associations. One approach to context-shifting is to
elaborate on the counterstereotypical associations of positive exemplars of disliked groups and
negative exemplars of liked groups (Dasgupta & Asgari, 2004; Dasgupta & Greenwald, 2001;
Dasgupta & Rivera, 2008; Gonsalkorale, Allen, Sherman, & Klauer, 2010). For example,
Dasgupta and Greenwald (2001; see also Joy-Gaba & Nosek, 2010) demonstrated that exposing
participants to images of admired Black exemplars and disliked White exemplars reduced
implicit prejudice. Similarly, representing the Black and White social categories with
counterstereotypical exemplars during implicit measurement reduces implicit prejudice (Govan
& Williams, 2004). Reductions in implicit prejudice can even occur by imagining
counterstereotypical exemplars (Turner & Crisp, 2010; Vezzali, Capozza, Giovannini, & Stathi,
2011), or by considering negative and positive events associated with the ingroup and outgroup
(Brauer, Er-rafiy, Kawakami, & Phills, 2012; Sassenberg & Wieber, 2005).
A similar approach shifts the representation of the target group by focusing the target of
evaluation on a subtype of the outgroup or by reframing the identity of the outgroup. For
example, exposing participants to positive stereotype-consistent features of an outgroup elicits
less implicit prejudice (Rodriguez-Bailon, Ruiz, & Moya, 2009). Likewise, Black targets are
evaluated more positively when categorized by occupation rather than by race (Mitchell et al.,
2003). Presenting targets within particular social roles and environments also influences implicit
evaluations. Showing a prison context with a Black target dressed as a lawyer elicited more
positive evaluations compared to when that same Black target was in the role of prisoner
(Barden, Maddux, Petty, and Brewer, 2004; see also Maddux, Barden, Brewer, & Petty, 2005).
Similarly, Black targets are evaluated more positively when the targets are placed in front of
positive backgrounds (e.g., a family barbeque) rather than negative backgrounds (a gang
incident; Wittenbrink, Judd, & Park, 2001).
Affect. Emotional states interact with prejudiced attitudes through mood-based regulation
of automatic processing or through the association of specific emotions with groups. Consistent
with evidence that negative affect down-regulates automatic processing of stimuli (Clore &
Huntsinger, 2007; Clore et al., 2001), people in negative moods exhibit reduced activation of