Overview

A central theme in social psychology is that people’s perceptions and behavior are often shaped by factors that lie outside their awareness and cannot be fully understood by intuitive methods such as self-reflection. By experimentally investigating how mental processes influence attitudes, beliefs, and behavior without people’s awareness or control, social psychology has uncovered an important window into mental life. My research capitalizes on this unconscious window into the mind to examine the ways in which the culture in which people live shapes their overt and covert judgments and behavior toward members of ingroups (i.e., social groups to which they belong) and outgroups (groups to which they do not belong). In general, this research shows that cultural stereotypes get passively imprinted in people’s mind simply as a function of living in societies where groups are treated unequally.

Several broad questions guide my research.

    * Do local environments influence the magnitude of implicit prejudices and preferences?
    * Do local environments influence the application of societal stereotypes to the self?
    * Do emotional states exacerbate or attenuate implicit bias toward outgroups?
    * When do implicit prejudices and preferences spill over into outward acts of discrimination?

Do local environments influence the magnitude of implicit prejudices and preferences?

My collaborators and I have found that implicit biases are attenuated when people are immersed in local environments that afford exposure to counterstereotypic images of disadvantaged groups. We have used both experimentally created situations and naturally existing situations, both cross-sectional studies and longitudinal studies, both media exposure and “real world” contact to show that exposure to counterstereotypic individuals decreases implicit prejudice and stereotypes. This initial work was done in collaboration with Tony Greenwald, Shaki Asgari, and Luis Rivera.

Do local environments influence the application of societal stereotypes to the self?

In a related line of work Shaki Asgari, Nicole Gilbert, and I have been interested in understanding the conditions under which exposure to counterstereotypic professional women might attenuate young women’s self-stereotypes about their own abilities and future career goals. We predicted and found that exposure to counterstereotypic individuals changed women’s implicit self-beliefs about their own leadership qualities and their future career-oriented intentions and behaviors only if participants subjectively identified with those individuals; not if they failed to identify. In other words, mere exposure to counterstereotypic ingroup members was not sufficient to inspire change in implicit self-beliefs.

Recently, we have begun to extend this line of inquiry to investigate how educational environments in math and the physical sciences might attenuate or exacerbate women’s implicit affinity for these disciplines. In a project funded by NSF we have begun to test whether exposure to female professors, experts, and peers increases female students’ implicit attitudes toward and beliefs about math and science; whether such environments affects their performance and influences their intentions to pursue science-oriented majors and coursework in the future. This work is in collaboration with my students Matthew Hunsinger and Jane Stout.

Do emotional states exacerbate or attenuate implicit bias toward outgroups?

In a collaborative project with David DeSteno and our students Matthew Hunsinger and Lisa Williams, we are interested in the intersection of emotion and intergroup relations by investigating whether implicit prejudice toward outgroups increases or decreases in response to perceivers’ emotional state. So far we have found that negative intergroup emotions such as anger and disgust, even when aroused by unrelated sources, spill over and increase implicit bias against real and fictitious outgroups whereas other negative emotions like sadness does not. However, when it comes to appraisals of real outgroups about which people have pre-existing knowledge, the emotion-induced bias is more nuanced such that emerges only when the incidental emotion is applicable to the cultural stereotype of the particular outgroup being appraised. For example, anger (but not disgust) increases implicit bias against Arab men.

We are now investigating the underlying mechanism by which anger acts to increase outgroup bias in several different ways. In one line of work, Ariel Pressman, Kumar Yogeeswaran, and I are using event related brain potentials (ERP) to test how experiences of anger influence brain potentials evoked within a few hundred milliseconds of seeing an outgroup member (an Arab man) or an ingroup member (an American man). Our interest is in determining whether anger increases vigilance and threat responses to Arab faces and/or whether anger decreases attempts to control one’s reactions to Arab faces

When do implicit prejudices and preferences spill over into outward acts of discrimination?

Luis Rivera and I have been interested in better understanding when implicit prejudice will (or won’t) lead to discriminatory action. We have found that the link between implicit prejudice and behavior is moderated by two controlled processes: (a) conscious egalitarian beliefs, and (b) behavioral control. When both conscious processes are deactivated, implicit prejudice elicits discriminatory behavior. When either one of the two processes is activated behavioral bias is eliminated.