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Research suggests that White Americans oppose welfare due to between-group processes: Many White Americans envision welfare recipients to be lazy, undeserving, and Black, and these perceptions predict reduced welfare support. In the present work, we consider the role of within-group processes that result from complementary beliefs that White people, as a group, are wealthy. Using a nationally representative sample of White and Black Americans (Study 1) and two large samples of White Americans (Study 2 and Study 3; N = 2,000), we find that many White Americans feel relatively lower status than their racial group. Furthermore, these perceived within-group status disparities are associated with reduced stereotyping of welfare recipients as lazy, which mediates greater policy support. Finally, we demonstrate that leading White Americans to take ownership of their racial privilege can increase perceptions of within-group status. And these shifts in within-group status have downstream consequences for attitudes toward welfare recipients and policies (replicating our previous two studies). We conclude that consideration of both between-group and within-group processes may provide a fuller understanding of how group-level privilege shapes White Americans' support (or lack thereof) for hierarchy-attenuating policy. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

White privilege lessons are sometimes used to increase awareness of racism. However, little research has investigated the consequences of these lessons. Across 2 studies ( N = 1,189), we hypothesized that White privilege lessons may both highlight structural privilege based on race, and simultaneously decrease sympathy for other challenges some White people endure (e.g., poverty)-especially among social liberals who may be particularly receptive to structural explanations of inequality. Indeed, both studies revealed that while social liberals were overall more sympathetic to poor people than social conservatives, reading about White privilege decreased their sympathy for a poor White (vs. Black) person. Moreover, these shifts in sympathy were associated with greater punishment/blame and fewer external attributions for a poor White person's plight. We conclude that, among social liberals, White privilege lessons may increase beliefs that poor White people have failed to take advantage of their racial privilege-leading to negative social evaluations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Theists often receive the benefit of being stereotyped as trustworthy and moral, whereas atheists are viewed as untrustworthy and immoral. The extreme divergence between the stereotypes of theists and atheists suggests that mental images of the two groups may also diverge. We investigated whether people have biased mental images of theists and atheists. The results suggest that mental images of theists are associated with more positive attributes than images of atheists (Study 1), and these mental images influence who is believed to behave morally and immorally (Study 2). Together the findings suggest that mental images may represent a subtle mechanism reinforcing group-based prejudices. (PsycINFO Database Record, ((c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).)

[Correction Notice: An Erratum for this article was reported online in Journal of Experimental Psychology: General on Oct 31 2016 (see record 2016-52334-001). ] The effect of primes (i.e., incidental cues) on human behavior has become controversial. Early studies reported counterintuitive findings, suggesting that primes can shape a wide range of human behaviors. Recently, several studies failed to replicate some earlier priming results, raising doubts about the reliability of those effects. We present a within-subjects procedure for priming behavior, in which participants decide whether to bet or pass on each trial of a gambling game. We report 6 replications (N = 988) showing that primes consistently affected gambling decisions when the decision was uncertain. Decisions were influenced by primes presented visibly, with a warning to ignore the primes (Experiments 1 through 3) and with subliminally presented masked primes (Experiment 4). Using a process dissociation procedure, we found evidence that primes influenced responses through both automatic and controlled processes (Experiments 5 and 6). Results provide evidence that primes can reliably affect behavior, under at least some conditions, without intention. The findings suggest that the psychological question of whether behavior priming effects are real should be separated from methodological issues affecting how easily particular experimental designs will replicate., (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)

Research on inattentional blindness demonstrates that when attending to 1 set of stimuli, people often fail to consciously perceive a task-irrelevant object. In this experiment, we tested for selective inattentional blindness to racial outgroup members. We reasoned that some racial groups would be perceived as more relevant than others, depending on the interpersonal goal that was active. White participants were primed with interpersonal goals that ranged from psychologically distant (searching for a coworker) to psychologically close (searching for a romantic partner). In the control condition, no goal was explicitly activated. Then, participants watched a video of 2 teams passing a ball and were asked to count the ball passes of one of the teams. In the middle of the video, a Caucasian or an African American man walked through the scene. Participants were then asked to report whether they had seen the interloper. Results revealed that as interpersonal goals became closer to the self, participants were less likely to see the African American man. This research demonstrates a new form of social exclusion based on early attention processes that may perpetuate racial bias.