Educational Debriefing Form

This study focused around people's implicit attitudes toward social groups. Implicit attitudes can be broadly defined as the tendency to like or dislike someone or something without understanding that you have that attitude. By contrast, explicit attitudes are the tendency to like or dislike something with the understanding that you have that attitude (Greenwald & Krieger, 2006).

The Implicit Association Test, or IAT, was developed to measure implicit ethnic and racial attitudes, because implicit attitudes held toward another racial or ethnic group are difficult to reveal using explicit, self-report methods (Greenwald et al., 1998). For example, people who are externally motivated to respond without prejudice tend to respond in an unprejudiced manner even if internally they do hold more prejudiced beliefs (Devine & Plant, 1998). Such external motivation could come from a participant believing that he or she is being evaluated during the self-report portion of an experiment.

Generally, American adults tend to show biased implicit attitudes toward ethnic/racial groups different from their own, and Baron and Banaji (2006) found that even at ages 6 and 10, children held implicit "pro-White/anti-Black bias." But can this implicit prejudice be reduced?

In our experiment, a range of different interventions were utilized as an attempt to change implicit negative attitudes toward Black Americans. In previous research, presenting participants with, for example, a vivid counterstereotypical scenario (a Black man rescuing the participant from a White assailant) successfully reduced implicit bias against Black people, when participants took the IAT afterward (Lai et al., 2014). We hope to produce similar results in our study comparing interventions to change negative implicit racial attitudes.

In addition to investigating effects on implicit racial attitudes, the study also explored how the different interventions affect people's explicit attitudes toward Black people, toward race-based inequality, and toward societal change more broadly. Finally, at the end of the study, you also completed a set of other measures as part of piloting for future studies on attitudes toward overweight people.

If you would like to learn more about the topic of this research, please consult the following review chapter, or any of the readings in the reference section below:

Blair, I. V., Dasgupta, N., & Glaser, J. (2014). Implicit attitudes. In Mikulincer, M., Shaver, P. R., Borgida, E., & Bargh, J. A. (Eds.), APA Handbook of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 1: Attitudes and Social Cognition (pp. 665–691). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

If you have any questions about this study please email the lead investigator, Gina Roussos (gina.roussos@yale.edu). If you have questions about the Yale Psychology Subject Pool, you may contact the coordinator at (203) 432-4518, or psychsubject.pool@yale.edu. Thanks again for your participation!

References

Baron, A. S., & Banaji, R. B. (2006). The development of implicit attitudes. Psychological Science, 17, 53–58.

Blair, I. V., Dasgupta, N., & Glaser, J. (in press). Implicit attitudes. In Mikulincer, M., Shaver, P. R., Borgida, E., & Bargh, J. A. (Eds.), APA Handbook of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 1: Attitudes and Social Cognition (pp. 665–691). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Devine, P. G., & Plant, E. A. (1998). Internal and external motivation to respond without prejudice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 811–832.

Greenwald, A. G., & Krieger, L. H. (2006). Implicit bias: Scientific foundations. California Law Review, 94, 945–967.

Greenwald, A. G., McGhee, D. E., & Schwartz, J. K. (1998). Measuring individual differences in implicit cognition: The implicit association test. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 1464–1480.

Lai, C. K., Marini, M., Lehr, S. A., Cerruti, C., Shin, J.-E. L., Joy-Gaba, J. A., …, & Nosek, B. A. (2014). Reducing implicit racial preferences: I. A comparative investigation of 17 interventions. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143, 1765–1785.