Out of mind but back in sight: Stereotypes on the rebound.

Abstract

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on this article. The research reported in this article was undertaken while Jolanda Jetten was a visiting Erasmus student at the

Prejudice, terrorism, and behavior therapy

“…Another method is to try to suppress negative thoughts directly (Wegner, Schneider, Carter, & White, 1987), internally scolding oneself for prejudicial words or concepts and trying to keep them out of mind. Doing so, however, makes these thoughts more frequent and more behaviorally impactful (Macrae, Bodenhausen, Milne, & Jetten, 1994;Smart & Wegner, 1999). For example, actively suppressing negative stereotypes results in more, not less, behavioral avoidance of stigmatized groups .…”

Perspective taking combats automatic expressions of racial bias.

“…Instead of watching a video depicting racial discrimination, participants received a photograph of a young Black male and wrote an essay about a day in his life (Galinsky & Moskowitz, 2000;Macrae, Bodenhausen, Milne, & Jetten, 1994). In this way, and unlike Experiment 1, participants were unconstrained in the context in which they chose to imagine the target and the manner in which they described him.…”

“…After completing the joystick task, participants were asked to help a different research assistant with a separate, unrelated task in a different room in the laboratory. In preparation for this task, participants were instructed to set up two chairs (one for themselves, the other for the research assistant), with the distance between the chairs serving as a second measure of automatic approach-avoidance reactions (e.g., Kawakami et al, 2007;Macrae et al, 1994). Depending on condition, participants were informed that the research assistant's name was either "Jake" (a stereotypically White name) or "Tyrone" (a stereotypically Black name), which again allowed us to assess approach-avoidance reactions to Blacks and Whites separately.…”

Nonverbal self-accuracy in interpersonal interaction

“…People's lack of insight into their behavior (either its nature or its determinants) leads to "authorship confusion" (Wegner, 2003), which appears to underlie a wide variety of phenomena including apparently brilliant horses, Chevreul's pendulum, moving tables, Ouija boards, dowsing rods, and, most recently, facilitated communication (Spitz, 1997;Vogt & Hyman, 2000;Wegner, 2002). Currently there is a widespread revival of the idea that people have limited self-insight, as evidenced by the growing use of implicit measures of behavior and attitudes (e.g., Greenwald & Banaji, 1995;Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998;Macrae, Bodenhausen, Milne, & Jetten, 1994;Phelps, O'Connor, & Cunningham, 2000). Perhaps it is this pessimism about the accuracy of self-reports that explains why so little research actually investigates people's awareness of how they behave.…”