Categorization by Race: The Impact of Automatic and Controlled Components of Racial Prejudice

doi:10.1006/jesp.1997.1330

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

Volume 33, Issue 5, September 1997, Pages 451-470

https://doi.org/10.1006/jesp.1997.1330 Get rights and content

Abstract

The present research examined the influence of both automatic and controlled processes related to racial prejudice on the categorization of stimulus persons by race. Participants judged the similarity of photos of individuals who varied in race, gender, and occupation. These similarity ratings were subjected to a multidimensional scaling procedure. The degree to which individuals weighted race in judging similarity was found to increase as a function of the extent to which race was attitude-evoking for the individual and to decrease as a function of motivation to control seemingly prejudiced reactions. It is suggested that the attention of individuals for whom attitudes were automatically activated in response to Black faces was automatically drawn to the race information, but that individuals motivated to control prejudiced reactions actively resisted weighting race heavily. Examination of the latencies with which the similarity judgments were made provided support for this account of the process underlying categorization by race.

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^☆: This research was supported by Research Scientist Development Award MH00452 and Grant MH38832 from the National Institute of Mental Health to the first author. The authors thank Michael Bailey, who developed and tested the software employed to present the high-resolution color images as primes and to collect the response-latency data. We also thank Jennifer Bradley for so capably serving as the experimenter for the second session and Edward Hirt and Eliot Smith for their helpful comments on an earlier version of the manuscript.

^☆☆: Address correspondence and reprint requests to Russell H. Fazio, Dept. of Psychology, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47401. E-mail: [email protected].

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Regular ArticleCategorization by Race: The Impact of Automatic and Controlled Components of Racial Prejudice☆,☆☆

Abstract

Regular Article
Categorization by Race: The Impact of Automatic and Controlled Components of Racial Prejudice☆,☆☆