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When people support voter identification (ID) laws, who do they imagine they are keeping in and out of the voting booth? We investigated this question across three studies. First, using a traditional survey approach, we found support for voter ID laws was associated with beliefs that ID requirements reduce illegal voting by both Black and White people to the same degree. Because explicit surveys are vulnerable to social desirability concerns, in the following two studies, we utilized an indirect measure, reverse correlation, to investigate mental images of those who try to vote illegally (Study 2) and mental images of those who should and should not get to vote (Study 3). The findings of these studies suggest that support for voter ID laws is associated with racially biased perceptions of illegal voters and who should get to vote. Critically, these biased perceptions may be underestimated by traditional explicit survey approaches.

The present research proposes and tests the “hedonic risk hypothesis” that affective experiences of pleasure provide a common currency that people use to equate economic and hedonic inequality. As a result, economic inequality can increase risk-taking in pursuit of pleasure even in noneconomic domains. Study 1 showed that higher economic inequality at the state level was associated with people in those states spending more time pursuing pleasure. Studies 2–4 were experiments, which demonstrated that when people perceive inequality in other people’s hedonic experience, they become riskier in their pursuit of pleasure for themselves. The relationship between inequality and risk-taking in pursuit of pleasurable experiences was moderated by upward social comparisons. Both monetary and hedonic inequality caused participants to become riskier in their pursuit of pleasure. The findings suggest a psychological pathway by which systemic effects of income inequality may affect individual health and social outcomes.

As economic inequality grows, more people stand to benefit from wealth redistribution. Yet in many countries, increasing inequality has not produced growing support for redistribution, and people often appear to vote against their economic interest. Here we suggest that two cognitive tendencies contribute to these paradoxical voting patterns. First, people gauge their income through social comparison, and those comparisons are usually made to similar others. Second, people are insensitive to large numbers, which leads them to underestimate the gap between themselves and the very wealthy. These two tendencies can help explain why subjective income is normally distributed (therefore most people think they are middle class) and partly explain why many people who would benefit from redistribution oppose it. We support our model’s assumptions using survey data, a controlled experiment, and agent-based modeling. Our model sheds light on the cognitive barriers to reducing inequality.

In the United States, both economic inequality and political conflict are on the rise. We investigated whether subjective socioeconomic status (SSS) may help explain why these dual patterns emerge. We hypothesized that higher SSS may increase naïve realism—the belief that one perceives the world as it is, rather than as interpreted through one’s own knowledge and beliefs—regarding political issues. Using a representative sample of the American electorate, we found that higher SSS predicted more political naïve realism toward those from a different political party (Study 1). The remaining experiments examined the causal relationship between SSS and political naïve realism (Studies 2–5). We extended these findings by investigating whether SSS influenced participants’ willingness to exclude those with contrary views from a vote (Studies 4 and 5). Together, these studies demonstrate that SSS enhances political naïve realism and can lead to the exclusion of others with contrary opinions.

Violent encounters between police and Black people have spurred debates about how race affects officer decision-making. We propose that racial disparities in police–civilian interactions are amplified when police interact with Black civilians who are encountered in groups. To test this possibility, we analyzed New York City stop and frisk data for over 2 million police stops. Results revealed that Black (vs. White) people were more likely to be frisked, searched, arrested, and have force used against them. Critically, these racial disparities were more pronounced for people stopped in groups (vs. alone): Being stopped in a group led to a 1.7% increase in racial disparities for frisks, a 1% increase for searches, a 0.3% increase for arrests, and a 1.7% increase for use of force. Moreover, these disparities held even when we controlled for a potential proxy of effective policing: discovery of illegal contraband. We conclude that groups amplify racial disparities in policing.

Implicit racial bias remains widespread, even among individuals who explicitly reject prejudice. One reason for the persistence of implicit bias may be that it is maintained through structural and historical inequalities that change slowly. We investigated the historical persistence of implicit bias by comparing modern implicit bias with the proportion of the population enslaved in those counties in 1860. Counties and states more dependent on slavery before the Civil War displayed higher levels of pro-White implicit bias today among White residents and less pro-White bias among Black residents. These associations remained significant after controlling for explicit bias. The association between slave populations and implicit bias was partially explained by measures of structural inequalities. Our results support an interpretation of implicit bias as the cognitive residue of past and present structural inequalities.

Implicit bias refers to automatically evoked mental associations about social groups. The idea has been influential across the social sciences as a way to explain persistent racial disparities amid changing self-report attitudes. Most research has treated implicit bias as an individual attitude. However, evidence suggests that it is neither a stable individual difference nor a strong correlate of individual behavior. Moreover, the individual-focused approach can lead researchers to neglect systemic racism as a cause of persistent disparities. We argue that implicit bias can be considered a cognitive reflection of systemic racism in the environment. In this view, implicit bias is an ongoing set of associations based on inequalities and stereotypes in the environment. As such, implicit bias changes when contexts change.

Patterns of discrimination are often complex (i.e., multiplicative), with different identities combining to yield especially potent discrimination. For example, Black men are disproportionately stopped by police to a degree that cannot be explained by the simple (i.e., additive) effects of being Black and being male. Researchers often posit corresponding mental representations (e.g., intersectional stereotypes for Black men) to account for these complex outcomes. We suggest that complex discrimination can be explained by simple stereotypes combined with threshold models of behavior—for example, “if someone’s threat level seems higher than X, stop that person.” Simulations provide proof of this concept. We show how gender-by-race discrimination in both promotions and police stops can be explained by simple stereotypes. We also explore race-by-age discrimination in police stops, in which racial disparities are greater for young adolescents. This work suggests that complex behaviors can sometimes arise from relatively simple cognitions.

The self-reference task (SRT) is an evaluative learning paradigm that uses the positive valence of the self to change the attitude towards new and neutral stimuli. In this contribution, we present evidence regarding the possibility of changing the attitudes towards the self, following a modified SRT. In three independent research studies, we provided participants in experimental groups with an SRT that paired the self with highly positive pictures. After the completion of the modified SRT, participants in the experimental group reported significantly higher explicit self-esteem (in all studies) and more positive self-views (Study 1 and Study 2), as compared with a control group. In the second study, students completed the modified SRT each day for two weeks. The participants in the experimental group reported more positive explicit self-esteem and higher psychological well-being (e.g., higher academic engagement and lower academic burnout), as compared to the control group. However, Study 3 did not provide evidence regarding the effect of the modified SRT on self-reported mental health. Our results suggest that asking individuals to relate the self with another stimulus can be used in both directions to transfer valence from the self to external targets, and from external targets to the self.

Negative affect toward outgroup members has long been known to predict discriminatory behavior. However, psychological constructionist theories of emotion suggest that negative affect may not always reflect antipathy for outgroup members. Rather, the subjective experience depends on how negative affect is conceptualized as specific discrete emotions (e.g., fear vs. sympathy). Our current research integrates theories of implicit bias with psychological constructionist theories of emotion to understand the implications of negative affect toward outgroup members. Across 3 studies, we find evidence that conceptualization of negative affect toward Black Americans as sympathy, rather than fear, mitigates the relationship between negative affect and fear of Black Americans on self-report and perceptual measures, and reduces racial bias on a psychophysiological measure. These studies provide evidence that conceptualization of negative affect can shape reactions to outgroup members. We discuss the implications of these findings and ground them in theories of implicit bias, social cognition, and affective science. (PsycINFO Database Record

Categorizing people into groups is fundamental to stereotype formation. Thus, across four studies, we hypothesize that perceiving people in the context of groups (vs. alone) will amplify the application of existing stereotypes. Consistent with hypotheses, our first two studies demonstrate that Black people in groups (vs. the same Black people viewed alone) are perceived as more representative of Black people in general (Study 1), and more representative of negative stereotypes of Black people (Study 2). Similarly, Study 3 finds that positive stereotypes of Asian people (i.e., “hard-working” and “good at math”) are perceived as more representative of Asian people in groups than those same Asian people viewed alone. Finally, Study 4 demonstrates that increased stereotyping of groups is driven by attributes associated with groups (i.e., proximity) rather than the number of exemplars. We conclude that groups are not only integral to the formation of stereotypes, but also to their application.

Liberals and conservatives currently struggle to reach political agreement on policy proposals. While political polarization is closely associated with this phenomenon, the precise psychological mechanisms via which polarization works to affect political compromise remain to be fully explored. Across five studies (N = 1236; 2126 total individual observations), we uncover one such mechanism by exploring a novel and robust bias that emerges at the crossroads of policy trade-offs and partisanship. We call it the Partisan Trade-off Bias. When interpreting policy trade-offs, both Democrats and Republicans view the unintended but unavoidable side effects of policies proposed by contrapartisans as wanted and intended. Yet they do not attribute intentionality to the very same types of side effects of policies proposed by copartisans. We provide evidence for this bias across four types of policy trade-offs, including taxes, environmental regulation, gun control, and voting rights. Importantly, we show that the partisan trade-off bias is a unique contributor to decreased willingness to accept policy deals from contrapartisans, thus reducing the chances of reaching political agreement. Our studies suggest that the partisan trade-off bias is a product of the lack of trust in contrapartisans. In an experimental study, we manipulate trust and decrease the magnitude of this bias, showing evidence for our proposed mechanism and revealing a potential intervention to foster political compromise.

Negative attitudes and discrimination against Latinos exist in the dominant U.S. culture and in healthcare systems, contributing to ongoing health disparities. This article provides findings of a pilot test of Yo Veo Salud (I See Health), an intervention designed to positively modify attitudes toward Latinos among medical trainees. The research question was: Compared to the comparison group, did the intervention group show lower levels of implicit bias against Latinos versus Whites, and higher levels of ethnocultural empathy, healthcare empathy, and patient-centeredness? We used a sequential cohort, post-test design to evaluate Yo Veo Salud with a sample of 69 medical trainees. The intervention setting was an academic medical institution in a Southeastern U.S. state with a fast-growing Latino population. The intervention was delivered, and data were collected online, between July and December of 2014. Participants in the intervention group showed greater ethnocultural empathy, healthcare empathy, and patient-centeredness, compared to the comparison group. The implicit measure assessed four attitudinal dimensions (pleasantness, responsibility, compliance, and safety). Comparisons between our intervention and comparison groups did not find any average differences in implicit anti-Latino bias between the groups. However, in a subset analysis of White participants, White participants in the intervention group demonstrated a significantly decreased level of implicit bias in terms of pleasantness. A dose response was also founded indicating that participants involved in more parts of the intervention showed more change on all measures. Our findings, while modest in size, provide proof of concept for Yo Veo Salud as a means for increasing ethno-cultural and physician empathy, and patient-centeredness among medical residents and decreasing implicit provider bias toward Latinos.

Implicit bias, which refers to mental associations that can lead to unintentional discrimination, has become a focus as many organizations and institutions try to reduce disparities and increase inclusiveness. Many forms of implicit bias training are aimed at changing individuals’ implicit biases. This approach treats implicit bias as a trait-like attribute of the person. Recent theoretical advances in understanding implicit bias, however, suggest that implicit bias may not be a stable attribute of individuals. Instead, implicit bias may better characterize social environments than people. Understanding implicit bias as a cultural phenomenon, rather than a fixed set of beliefs, has important policy implications. Most notably, the best approaches for reducing the harm of implicit bias should aim at changing social contexts rather than changing people’s minds. Here, we highlight some considerations of this new understanding of implicit bias for policy makers aiming to reduce disparities and increase inclusion.

Three studies examine how subtle shifts in framing can alter the mind perception of groups. Study 1 finds that people generally perceive groups to have less mind than individuals. However, Study 2 demonstrates that changing the framing of a group from "a group of people" to "people in a group," substantially increases mind perception-leading to comparable levels of mind between groups and individuals. Study 3 reveals that this change in framing influences people's sympathy for groups, an effect mediated by mind perception. We conclude that minor linguistic shifts can have big effects on how groups are perceived-with implications for mind perception and sympathy for mass suffering. (PsycINFO Database Record

Two decades of research have documented a robust racial bias in the perceptual identification of weapons and the decision to shoot in laboratory simulations. In this chapter, we review the advances that have been made in understanding the causes, correlates, and psychological processes contributing to race biases in threat perception across different experimental paradigms. We begin by offering a psychological definition of bias, and considering how it may differ from folk concepts of bias. We discuss the contributions of this work to the broader field of implicit attitudes research. Most implicit bias research uses experimental tasks as measures of underlying attitudes. In contrast, research on racial bias in threat perception has focused on biased behaviors rather than attitudes. As a result, progress has been made in understanding not only automatic threat reactions but also the cognitive control processes that moderate the expression of automatic reactions in overt behavior. This literature has helped integrate research on implicit bias with research on executive control in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience. Moreover, this research has served as a test bed for developing quantitative models of social biases, including the use of signal detection theory, multinomial models, and diffusion models. We discuss the relationships among these different classes of models, and what each can contribute to understanding biased threat detection. We consider the complexities in linking findings from well-controlled laboratory experiments to field studies on actual police use of force. We end by considering questions about the rationality of racial biases, and argue that the rationality of a behavior cannot be understood as an empirical question apart from normative judgments of the behavior.

In a cross-sectional study of youth ages 8–15, we examined implicit and explicit gender stereotypes regarding math and language abilities. We investigated how implicit and explicit stereotypes differ across age and gender groups and whether they are consistent with cultural stereotypes. Participants (N = 270) completed the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP) and a survey of explicit beliefs. Across all ages, boys showed neither math nor language implicit gender biases, whereas girls implicitly favored girls in both domains. These findings are counter to cultural stereotypes, which favor boys in math. On the explicit measure, both boys’ and girls’ primary tendency was to favor girls in math and language ability, with the exception of elementary school boys, who rated genders equally. We conclude that objective gender differences in academic success guide differences in children’s explicit reports and implicit biases.

Evaluative conditioning procedures change people’s evaluations of stimuli that are paired with pleasant or unpleasant items. To test whether influence awareness allows people to resist such persuasive attempts, we conducted three experiments. In the first two experiments featuring low levels of influence awareness (N1 = 96, N2 = 93) we manipulated the degree of control people have in expressing their attitudes, by providing participants in one condition with the option to “pass” rather than respond, when they felt influenced in their evaluations of conditioned stimuli. In the third experiment (N3 = 240) we manipulated the level of influence awareness by using a warning instruction similar to the one found in prior controllability studies, while giving everyone the option to pass the evaluation when they felt influenced. All studies found that participants often failed to use the skip option to exert control over conditioned preferences. In some cases, this may be because participants failed to notice the pairings, but in most cases because participants lacked awareness that the pairings could influence them. Even when explicitly warned that the pairings could influence them, participants seemed to believe that they were not vulnerable to such effects.

Can implicit bias be changed? In a recent longitudinal study, Lai and colleagues (2016, Study 2) compared nine interventions intended to reduce racial bias across 18 university campuses. Although all interventions changed participants’ bias on an immediate test, none were effective after a delay. This study has been interpreted as strong evidence that implicit biases are difficult to change. We revisited Lai et al.’s study to test whether the stability observed reflected persistent individual attitudes or stable environments. Our reanalysis ( N = 4,842) indicates that individual biases did not return to preexisting levels. Instead, campus means returned to preexisting campus means, whereas individual scores fluctuated mostly randomly. Campus means were predicted by markers of structural inequality. Our results are consistent with the theory that implicit bias reflects biases in the environment rather than individual dispositions. This conclusion is nearly the opposite of the original interpretation: Although social environments are stable, individual implicit biases are ephemeral.

Psychological research has devoted considerable attention to the relationship between the multiple category dimensions that can be extracted from faces. In the present studies, we investigated the role of experience and learning on the way the social perceiver deals with multiple category dimensions. Specifically, we tested whether learning which of 2 dimensions is the most relevant to the task at hand influences the encoding and retrieval of both task-relevant and irrelevant dimensions. In our studies, participants went through several cycles, each consisting of a study and a test phase. We manipulated the structure of the tests such that participants were probed on only 1 category dimension (age or gender), despite viewing faces of both category dimensions in all study phases. We hypothesized that when participants were repeatedly tested on 1 dimension, they would proactively control their attention toward that specific dimension and away from the nonrelevant dimension. Five studies demonstrated that: (a) participants learned which dimension was test-relevant such that they gradually became faster and more accurate on that dimension; (b) when the gender dimension was test-relevant, participants were faster and more accurate retrieving information concerning the target faces' gender than age, while the opposite did not happen when the age dimension was test-relevant; and (c) this dominance of the gender dimension is mainly caused by the inhibition of the age dimension. Implications about the importance of previous experience and control for research on social categorization in general and research examining the interplay between gender and age are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Experiences of discrete emotion play important roles in a variety of psychological domains. Yet, current measures of discrete emotion face significant limitations. Biological and behavioral measures often do not capture subjective experiences related to discrete emotions, while self-reports are susceptible to reporting biases. An indirect measure of discrete emotions would help address the limitations of existing measures; however, few such measures exist. Across 4 studies, we offer an indirect measure of discrete emotion. Our results provide evidence that our measure can distinguish between participants' experiences of same-valenced emotions (Study 1), is relatively less susceptible to deliberate attempts to suppress emotional responses (Studies 2 and 3), and is also relatively less susceptible to the influence of social norms (i.e., gender stereotypes) in self-reported discrete emotions than an explicit measure (Study 4). Overall, these findings demonstrate that our measure of discrete emotions can capture discrete emotional responses above and beyond affective valence, is indirect, and measures affective processes contributing to discrete emotional responses. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Despite growing workforce diversity, organizational attention, and social pressure (e.g, #MeToo), inequalities along axes of race, gender, class, sexual orientation, and ability remain a persistent...

Objective: Implicit attitudes toward alcohol predict drinking among adults and adolescents. If implicit attitudes reflected associations learned through direct experience with drinking, then they would likely only predict drinking among individuals who have previously consumed alcohol. In contrast, if implicit attitudes reflected indirect experience through social messages, they might also then predict future drinking, even among individuals with no drinking experience. In this study, we tested whether implicit attitudes would predict initiation of drinking for the first time, and whether parents' and friends' norms toward alcohol would influence the development of implicit attitudes. Method: For this study, we followed 868 adolescents between the ages of 12 and 15 years for 3 years. Implicit attitudes were measured using the affect misattribution procedure (Payne, Cheng, Govorun, & Stewart, 2005; Payne, Govorun, & Arbuckle, 2008). Explicit intentions to drink and the frequency of drinking and binge drinking were measured at each of 3 annual waves. Results: Implicit attitudes toward alcohol predicted future drinking behavior 1 year later, and effects were similar for adolescents who had previously tried alcohol and for those who had not. To understand what factors might shape implicit attitudes among participants without drinking experience, we examined the role of parental norms and friends' norms toward drinking. Parental approval of drinking predicted the development of more positive implicit attitudes, which in turn predicted later drinking. Conclusion: Implicit attitudes toward alcohol can develop in advance of direct experience drinking alcohol. Results have implications for the implicit processes underpinning adolescent drinking, and the processes by which implicit associations are learned.

In daily life, we frequently encounter false claims in the form of consumer advertisements, political propaganda, and rumors. Repetition may be one way that insidious misconceptions, such as the belief that vitamin C prevents the common cold, enter our knowledge base. Research on the illusory truth effect demonstrates that repeated statements are easier to process, and subsequently perceived to be more truthful, than new statements. The prevailing assumption in the literature has been that knowledge constrains this effect (i.e., repeating the statement "The Atlantic Ocean is the largest ocean on Earth" will not make you believe it). We tested this assumption using both normed estimates of knowledge and individuals' demonstrated knowledge on a postexperimental knowledge check (Experiment 1). Contrary to prior suppositions, illusory truth effects occurred even when participants knew better. Multinomial modeling demonstrated that participants sometimes rely on fluency even if knowledge is also available to them (Experiment 2). Thus, participants demonstrated knowledge neglect, or the failure to rely on stored knowledge, in the face of fluent processing experiences.

Exposure to media has been shown to affect viewers' attitudes and behaviors in many ways, yet viewers often deny being influenced. One reason for this may be that influences of media are sometimes mediated by implicit processes that are overlooked by explicit self-reports. In this article, we examine the utility of implicit attitude measures for shedding light on questions in media psychology. In particular, we summarize the current state of research on popularly used implicit measurement techniques, including their strengths and limitations. We then review recent studies that have employed implicit techniques and consider conditions under which implicit and explicit measures diverge, and why.

Implicit measures of racial attitudes often assess reactions to images of individuals to infer attitudes toward an entire social category. However, an increasing amount of research indicates that responses to individuals are highly dependent on context and idiosyncratic features of individual exemplars. Thus, using images of individuals to assess beliefs about a whole social category may not be ideal. Across three time points, we predicted that using images of groups would mitigate the influence of idiosyncratic features of individual targets and, thus, provide a better measurement tool to assess beliefs about a category to which all group members belong. Results revealed that an implicit measure that presented images of Black and White groups had greater construct validity, test–retest reliability, and predictive validity as compared with an implicit measure that presented the same exemplars individually. We conclude that groups provide a window into existing beliefs about social categories.

In response to our article (1), van Hoorn (2) suggests that our analysis focuses too narrowly on perceived need as the mechanism linking inequality to increased risk taking. The author does not dispute the evidence we present for the role of perceived need, but proposes an additional mechanism linking inequality to risk taking. The proposed mechanism is an “informational” signal: if others have done better than the person themself, it may be necessary to take greater risks.

Intrinsic rewards are typically thought to stem from an activity's inherent properties and not from separable rewards one receives from it. Yet, people may not consciously notice or remember all the subtle external rewards that correspond with an activity and may misattribute some directly to the activity itself. We propose that perceptions of intrinsic reward can often be byproducts of misattributed causal inference, and present some initial evidence that perceptions of intrinsic reward can in fact increase when words pertaining to an activity are subtly paired with pleasant context cues. Importantly, these effects follow classic boundary conditions of both misattribution and intrinsic motivation; insofar as they were extinguished when participants could make a proper source attribution and/or when the activity became associated with a blatant external reward. We further propose a distinction can be made between authentically "intrinsic" rewards and the illusion of intrinsic rewards caused by misattributed positive affect.

Do people view others as good or evil? Although people generally cooperate with others and view others' “true selves” as intrinsically good, we suggest that they are likely to assume that the actions of others are evil—at least when they are ambiguous. Nine experiments provide support for promiscuous condemnation: the general tendency to assume that ambiguous actions are immoral. Both cognitive and functional arguments support the idea of promiscuous condemnation. Cognitively, dyadic completion suggests that when the mind perceives some elements of immorality (or harm), it cannot help but perceive other elements of immorality. Functionally, assuming that ambiguous actions are immoral helps people quickly identify potential harm and provide aid to others. In the first seven experiments, participants often judged neutral nonsense actions (e.g., “John pelled”) as immoral, especially when the context surrounding these nonsense actions included elements of immorality (e.g., intentionality and suffering). In the last two experiments, participants showed greater promiscuous condemnation under time pressure, suggesting an automatic tendency to assume immorality that people must effortfully control.

The affect misattribution procedure (AMP) measures automatically activated responses based on the misattributions people make about the sources of their affect or cognitions. The AMP is one of the most widely used implicit attitude measures, and evidence regarding its reliability and validity has grown rapidly. In this brief review, we survey the evidence of reliability and validity while discussing the mechanisms that drive priming effects in the AMP. We consider the unique capabilities of this procedure to measure implicit and explicit cognition with simplicity and greater experimental control than other measures. Finally, we offer recommendations for using the AMP effectively for a wide variety of research purposes.

Metacognitive inferences about ownership for one’s implicit attitudes have the power to turn implicit bias into explicit prejudice. In Study 1, participants were assigned to construe their implicit attitudes toward gay men as belonging to themselves (owned) or as unrelated to the self (disowned). Construing one’s implicit responses as owned led to greater implicit-explicit attitude correspondence. In Study 2, we measured ownership for implicit attitudes as well as self-esteem. We predicted that ownership inferences would dictate explicit attitudes to the degree that people had positive views of the self. Indeed, higher ownership for implicit bias was associated with greater implicit-explicit attitude correspondence, and this effect was driven by participants high in self-esteem. Finally, in Study 3, we manipulated inferences of ownership and measured self-esteem. Metacognitions of ownership affected implicit-explicit attitude correspondence but only among those with relatively high self-esteem. We conclude that subjective inferences about implicit bias affect explicit prejudice.

We describe the situated inference model and discuss how it may contribute to better understanding priming effects and their absence. The model suggests that priming effects result when primes make certain ideas more likely to come to mind and those ideas are misattributed to one’s own thoughts, interpreted in light of situational affordances. This perspective organizes a range of moderators identified in previous priming studies. We also describe new research that has tested the model’s predictions. Finally, we consider the implications of the model for debates about the nature and replicability of priming effects on higher order cognition and behavior. Sometimes simple ideas combine to create something surprising. The effects of incidental stimuli (primes) on higher order thought and behavior are surely surprising, and this has contributed to both enthusiasm and skepticism about priming effects. We have argued that the appearance and disappearance of priming effects can be understood based on the combination of three simple premises. The first is that primes tend to increase the accessibility of related information, making certain thoughts and feelings more likely to come to mind. The second is that people tend to assume that their thoughts and feelings are about whatever they are attending to at the moment (even when the thoughts were actually caused by something else; see Higgins, 1998). And the third is that people tend to use accessible thoughts and feelings to guide responses to the situations in which they find themselves. From this perspective, priming is expected only when all three of these processes coincide. Stated simply, priming effects result when primes make certain ideas more likely to come to mind and those ideas are misattributed to one’s own thoughts, interpreted in light of situational affordances. To know how a

Objective Recent research indicates that subjective socioeconomic status (SES) – the perception of one's own SES compared with other people – is an important predictor of cancer-related health outcomes. Subjective SES may function as a psychosocial mechanism by which objective SES affects health, well-being, and, more broadly, quality of life among cancer survivors. This study tested whether the association between objective SES and indicators of quality of life was mediated by subjective SES in a sample of cancer survivors who had undergone hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. Methods Hematopoietic stem cell transplantation survivors (N = 268) completed measures of objective and subjective SES, along with four measures related to quality of life (depressive symptoms, health-related quality of life, symptoms of generalized distress, and posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms). Results Higher objective SES was associated with greater quality of life across all four measures. Subjective SES mediated the relationship between objective SES and depressive symptoms (total indirect effect b = −0.09, 95% confidence interval [CI] [−0.15, −0.05]), generalized distress (total indirect effect b = −0.08, 95% CI [−0.13, −0.04]), health-related quality of life (total indirect effect b = 0.10, 95% CI [0.06, 0.17]), and posttraumatic stress disorder (total indirect effect b = −0.08, 95% CI [−0.14, −0.04]). Conclusions Findings extend work on subjective SES to cancer and suggest that SES gradients in patient outcomes after cancer may reflect not only material resources but also psychosocial factors related to rank within social hierarchies. Further research may provide insights useful for reducing disparities in this population. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Discriminatory experiences are not only momentarily distressing, but can also increase risk for lasting physical and psychological problems. Specifically, significantly higher rates of depression and depressive symptoms are reported among people who are frequently the target of prejudice. Given the gravity of this problem, this research focuses on an individual difference, trait mindfulness, as a protective factor in the association between discrimination and depressive symptoms. In a community sample of 605 individuals, trait mindfulness dampens the relationship between perceived discrimination and depressive symptoms. Additionally, mindfulness provides benefits above and beyond those of positive emotions. Trait mindfulness may thus operate as a protective individual difference for targets of discrimination.

Implicit bias is defined, in part, by a lack of intent. Yet the implicit attitudes literature has made little contact with research on the experience of conscious will, which suggests that the feeling of conscious intent is an inference rather than a direct report of how actions are caused. We tested the hypothesis that inferences about one’s intentions shape whether an automatically activated attitude is endorsed explicitly. In a first study, individuals who perceived their attitudes toward gay men to be intended showed stronger implicit–explicit correspondence. In a second study, we manipulated perceptions of intent. Inferences that implicit bias was intended caused participants to express those biases on an explicit measure. A third study replicated the experimental effects and found that metacognitions of intent were especially influential among individuals who were motivated to be unprejudiced. Results suggest that metacognitive inferences about intent can shape whether automatically activated bias becomes explicitly endorsed prejudice.

According to interdependence theory, interpersonal situations that vary in their surface characteristics can be united by similarities in their underlying structure. Likewise, factor analytic approaches to personality combine many traits into a small number of factors. In the current research, we use interdependence theory and existing factor analyses of personality traits to measure people's lay theories about the ways traits and situations interact. We predict that traits representative of honesty–humility/virtue will be rated as more relevant to situations with non-correspondent outcomes (a gain in one person's outcomes is associated with a loss in the other person's outcomes) than to situations with correspondent outcomes (a gain in one person's outcomes is associated with a gain in the other person's outcomes). Conversely, we predict that traits representative of agreeableness will be rated as more relevant to situations with correspondent outcomes than to situations with non-correspondent outcomes. An experiment found the expected trait X situation interaction revealing that subjects expect certain types of traits to be most relevant to specific types of situations. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Implicit moral evaluations-i.e., immediate, unintentional assessments of the wrongness of actions or persons-play a central role in supporting moral behavior in everyday life. Yet little research has employed methods that rigorously measure individual differences in implicit moral evaluations. In five experiments, we develop a new sequential priming measure-the Moral Categorization Task-and a multinomial model that decomposes judgment on this task into multiple component processes. These include implicit moral evaluations of moral transgression primes (Unintentional Judgment), accurate moral judgments about target actions (Intentional Judgment), and a directional tendency to judge actions as morally wrong (Response Bias). Speeded response deadlines reduced Intentional Judgment but not Unintentional Judgment (Experiment 1). Unintentional Judgment was stronger toward moral transgression primes than non-moral negative primes (Experiments 2-4). Intentional Judgment was associated with increased error-related negativity, a neurophysiological indicator of behavioral control (Experiment 4). Finally, people who voted for an anti-gay marriage amendment had stronger Unintentional Judgment toward gay marriage primes (Experiment 5). Across Experiments 1-4, implicit moral evaluations converged with moral personality: Unintentional Judgment about wrong primes, but not negative primes, was negatively associated with psychopathic tendencies and positively associated with moral identity and guilt proneness. Theoretical and practical applications of formal modeling for moral psychology are discussed.

A recent study of the affect misattribution procedure (AMP) found that participants who retrospectively reported that they intentionally rated the primes showed larger effect sizes and higher reliability. The study concluded that the AMP’s validity depends on intentionally rating the primes. We evaluated this conclusion in three experiments. First, larger effect sizes and higher reliability were associated with (incoherent) retrospective reports of both (a) intentionally rating the primes and (b) being unintentionally influenced by the primes. A second experiment manipulated intentions to rate the primes versus targets and found that this manipulation produced systematically different effects. Experiment 3 found that giving participants an option to “pass” when they felt they were influenced by primes did not reduce priming. Experimental manipulations, rather than retrospective self-reports, suggested that participants make post hoc confabulations to explain their responses. There was no evidence that validity in the AMP depends on intentionally rating primes.

[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.

When people make important decisions, such as selecting a job candidate or graduate school applicant based on how well they fit with that imagined ideal. In two experiments we provide evidence that imagining the ideal has unintended consequences. Imagining an ideal candidate for a professional job led participants to preferentially imagine a White candidate (Experiment 1) and to preferentially hire a White candidate over a Black candidate with matched qualifications (Experiment 2). These effects were independent of explicit prejudice, suggesting that even low-prejudice individuals may be affected by this bias. However, an alternative imagery strategy—imagining a variety of suitable applicants—was effective at remediating the bias. In some cases discrimination may result not from prejudiced attitudes but from failures of the imagination.

Although stereotypes have traditionally been regarded as stable, research has documented their considerable malleability. One potential source of such malleability is intrusion into the stereotype of other concepts also activated when the stereotype is activated. In three experiments we assessed the extent to which stereotypes were influenced by stereotypic, stereotype-unrelated, or counter-stereotypic traits activated in a completely unrelated context immediately prior to stereotype measurement. Across experiments, priming of stereotype-unrelated traits increased their inclusion in the stereotype, whereas priming of counter-stereotypic traits had no effect in the subsequently assessed stereotype. In Experiment 3 we collected perceived dispersion measures and showed that although priming counter-stereotypic traits had no effect on overall characterization of the target group, it boosted perceptions of the group's variability. We accounted for these results by extending Higgins' (1989) Synapse Model of knowledge accessibility to the stereotype domain.

Misattributions people make about their own reaction to ambiguous stimuli can be used to measure personality self–concepts implicitly. On the basis of a semantic misattribution priming paradigm [semantic misattribution procedure (SMP)], we assessed the implicit personality self–concept related to three dimensions included in the Big–Five model: conscientiousness, neuroticism, and extraversion. Across three studies (N1 = 98, N2 = 140, and N3 = 135), the SMP was robustly related, in the expected direction, to individual differences in self–reported personality questionnaires and managed to predict both self–reported and objectively measured behaviours. The main advantage of SMP over classical explicit measures of personality is its higher resistance to social desirability tendencies, although its psychometric properties are somewhat lower than those pertaining to explicit measures of personality. Finally, comparisons of our results with studies that used other implicit measures of personality self–concept indicate that the SMP has higher criterion validity. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

When posting or re-using the article, you should provide a link/URL from the article posted to the SAGE Journals Online site where the article is published: http://online.sagepub.com and please make the following acknowledgment: "The final, definitive version of this paper has been published in , Vol/Issue, Month/Year by SAGE Publications Ltd, All rights reserved. © [The Author(s)]", Past research has found that primes can automatically initiate unconscious goal striving. Recent models of priming have suggested that this effect can be moderated by validation processes. According to a goal-validation perspective, primes should cause changes in one’s motivational state to the extent people have confidence in the prime-related mental content. Across three experiments, we provided the first direct empirical evidence for this goal-validation account. Using a variety of goal priming manipulations (cooperation vs. competition, achievement, and self-improvement vs. saving money) and validity inductions (power, ease, and writing about confidence), we demonstrated that the impact of goal primes on behavior occurs to a greater extent when conditions foster confidence (vs. doubt) in mental contents. Indeed, when conditions foster doubt, goal priming effects are eliminated or counter to the implications of the prime. The implications of these findings for research on goal priming and validation processes are discussed., The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported in part by NSF Grant BCS-0847834 (to R.E.P.) and by Spanish grant PSI2011-26212 (to P.B.).

In a comprehensive meta-analysis of 167 studies, the authors found that sequential priming tasks were significantly associated with behavioral measures ( r = .28) and with explicit attitude measures ( r = .20). Priming tasks continued to predict behavior after controlling for the effects of explicit attitudes. These results generalized across a variety of study domains and methodological variations. Within-study moderator analyses revealed that priming tasks have good specificity, only predicting behavior and explicit measures under theoretically expected conditions. Together, these results indicate that sequential priming—one of the earliest methods of investigating implicit social cognition—continues to be a valid tool for the psychological scientist.

Although source monitoring is an essential function of cognition, we often mistakenly identify the source of accessible information. This misattribution process can account for the influence of mood on judgment and has recently been proposed as a possible mechanism underlying the effect of conceptual primes on behavior. We provide evidence that attributional processes can indeed modulate the impact of primes on behavior. In two studies, primes were more likely to impact behavior when participants mis-attributed prime-related content to their own thoughts. When attributing this same content to an external source, the primes had no effect. This was true even with the use of subliminal primes, and for reflective and reflexive forms of behavior.

Recent research in social psychology suggests that people harbor “implicit race biases,” biases which can be unconscious or uncontrollable. Because awareness and control have traditionally been deemed necessary for the ascription of moral responsibility, implicit biases present a unique challenge: do we pardon discrimination based on implicit biases because of its unintentional nature, or do we punish discrimination regardless of how it comes about? The present experiments investigated the impact such theories have upon moral judgments about racial discrimination. The results show that different theories differ in their impact on moral judgments: when implicit biases are defined as unconscious, people hold the biased agent less morally responsible than when these biases are defined as automatic (i.e., difficult to control), or when no theory of implicit bias is provided.

The 2008 US presidential election was an unprecedented opportunity to study the role of racial prejudice in political decision making. Although explicitly expressed prejudice has declined dramatically during the last four decades, more subtle implicit forms of prejudice (which come to mind automatically and may influence behavior unintentionally) may still exist. In three surveys of representative samples of American adults, explicit and implicit prejudice were measured during the months preceding the election. Both explicit and implicit prejudice were significant predictors of later vote choice. Citizens higher in explicit prejudice were less likely to vote for Barack Obama and more likely to vote for John McCain. After controlling for explicit prejudice, citizens higher in implicit prejudice were less likely to vote for Obama, but were not more likely to vote for McCain. Instead, they were more likely to either abstain or to vote for a third-party candidate rather than Obama. The results suggest that racial prejudice may continue to influence the voting process even among people who would not endorse these attitudes.