B. Keith Payne

An inkblot for attitudes: Affect misattribution as implicit measurement

Misattributions people make about their own affective reactions can be used to measure attitudes implicitly. Combining the logic of projective tests with advances in priming research, the affect misattribution procedure (AMP) was sensitive to normatively favorable and unfavorable evaluations (Experiments 1-4), and the misattribution effect was strong at both fast and slow presentation rates (Experiments 3 and 4). Providing further evidence of validity, the AMP was strongly related to individual differences in self-reported political attitudes and voting intentions (Experiment 5). In the socially sensitive domain of racial attitudes, the AMP showed in-group bias for Black and White participants. AMP performance correlated with explicit racial attitudes, a relationship that was moderated by motivations to control prejudice (Experiment 6). Across studies, the task was unaffected by direct warnings to avoid bias. Advantages of the AMP include large effect sizes, high reliability, ease of use, and resistance to correction attempts.

Prejudice and perception : The role of automatic and controlled processes in misperceiving a weapon

Two experiments used a priming paradigm to investigate the influence of racial cues on the perceptual identification of weapons. In Experiment 1, participants identified guns faster when primed with Black faces compared with White faces. In Experiment 2, participants were required to respond quickly, causing the racial bias to shift from reaction time to accuracy. Participants misidentified tools as guns more often when primed with a Black face than with a White face. L. L. Jacobys (1991) process dissociation procedure was applied to demonstrate that racial primes influenced automatic (A) processing, but not controlled (C) processing. The response deadline reduced the C estimate but not the A estimate. The motivation to control prejudice moderated the relationship between explicit prejudice and automatic bias. Implications are discussed on applied and theoretical levels.

Conceptualizing Control in Social Cognition: How Executive Functioning Modulates the Expression of Automatic Stereotyping

Two studies investigated the role of executive control in moderating the relationship between automatic stereotype activation and behavioral responses. Race bias in weapon identification was used to measure stereotyping, and a process dissociation procedure was used to measure automatic and controlled components of performance. In Experiment 1, the controlled component was shown to correlate with general attention control and race-specific motivations to control prejudice. Across multiple measures, automatic race bias was more likely to be expressed as behavioral discrimination among individuals with poor executive control. Experiment 2 found the same relationship between automatic and controlled components of behavior when predicting impressions of a Black individual. Executive control is discussed in the context of other control strategies in influential dual-process models of stereotyping.

Why do implicit and explicit attitude tests diverge? The role of structural fit.

Implicit and explicit attitude tests are often weakly correlated, leading some theorists to conclude that implicit and explicit cognition are independent. Popular implicit and explicit tests, however, differ in many ways beyond implicit and explicit cognition. The authors examined in 4 studies whether correlations between implicit and explicit tests were influenced by the similarity in task demands (i.e., structural fit) and, hence, the processes engaged by each test. Using an affect misattribution procedure, they systematically varied the structural fit of implicit and explicit tests of racial attitudes. As test formats became more similar, the implicit-explicit correlation increased until it became higher than in most previous research. When tests differ in structure, they may underestimate the relationship between implicit and explicit cognition. The authors propose a solution that uses procedures to maximize structural fit.

The Situated Inference Model: An Integrative Account of the Effects of Primes on Perception, Behavior, and Motivation

The downstream consequences of a priming induction range from changes in the perception of objects in the environment to the initiation of prime-related behavior and goal striving. Although each of these outcomes has been accounted for by separate mechanisms, we argue that a single process could produce all three priming effects. In this article, we introduce the situated inference model of priming, discuss its potential to account for these divergent outcomes with one mechanism, and demonstrate its ability to organize the priming literatures surrounding these effects. According to the model, primes often do not cause direct effects, instead altering only the accessibility of prime-related mental content. This information produces downstream effects on judgment, behavior, or motivation when it is mistakenly viewed as originating from one’s own internal thought processes. When this misattribution occurs, the prime-related mental content becomes a possible source of information for solving whatever problems are afforded by the current situation. Because different situations afford very different questions and concerns, the inferred meaning of this prime-related content can vary greatly. The use of this information to answer qualitatively different questions can lead a single prime to produce varied effects on judgment, behavior, and motivation.

Escaping affect: How motivated emotion regulation creates insensitivity to mass suffering.

As the number of people in need of help increases, the degree of compassion people feel for them ironically tends to decrease. This phenomenon is termed the collapse of compassion. Some researchers have suggested that this effect happens because emotions are not triggered by aggregates. We provide evidence for an alternative account. People expect the needs of large groups to be potentially overwhelming, and, as a result, they engage in emotion regulation to prevent themselves from experiencing overwhelming levels of emotion. Because groups are more likely than individuals to elicit emotion regulation, people feel less for groups than for individuals. In Experiment 1, participants displayed the collapse of compassion only when they expected to be asked to donate money to the victims. This suggests that the effect is motivated by self-interest. Experiment 2 showed that the collapse of compassion emerged only for people who were skilled at emotion regulation. In Experiment 3, we manipulated emotion regulation. Participants who were told to down-regulate their emotions showed the collapse of compassion, but participants who were told to experience their emotions did not. We examined the time course of these effects using a dynamic rating to measure affective responses in real time. The time course data suggested that participants regulate emotion toward groups proactively, by preventing themselves from ever experiencing as much emotion toward groups as toward individuals. These findings provide initial evidence that motivated emotion regulation drives insensitivity to mass suffering.

Sequential Priming Measures of Implicit Social Cognition A Meta-Analysis of Associations With Behavior and Explicit Attitudes

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.

Best laid plans: Effects of goals on accessibility bias and cognitive control in race-based misperceptions of weapons

Abstract This study applied process dissociation (PD) to investigate the role of conscious goals in controlling automatic influences of stereotypes. A priming procedure was used to show that the presence of Black (vs. White) faces caused stereotypical misidentifications of objects. Specifically, Black primes caused lures to be misidentified as weapons, whereas White primes caused weapons to be misidentified as non-threatening objects. By manipulating the goals with which participants completed the experiment, we demonstrated that the stereotype bias was invariant across conscious goals to avoid vs. use the influence of race. PD analysis provided three major insights. First, the impact of race was mediated solely through an unintentional accessibility bias. Second, requiring participants to respond rapidly increased the impact of stereotypes, an effect that was mediated by a reduction in controlled discrimination among stimuli. Finally, calling attention to race increased the stereotype accessibility bias, regardless of whether race was made salient with the intention to use, or the intention to avoid the influence of race.

Bringing Automatic Stereotyping Under Control: Implementation Intentions as Efficient Means of Thought Control

The evidence for whether intentional control strategies can reduce automatic stereotyping is mixed. Therefore, the authors tested the utility of implementation intentions— specific plans linking a behavioral opportunity to a specific response—in reducing automatic bias. In three experiments, automatic stereotyping was reduced when participants made an intention to think specific counterstereotypical thoughts whenever they encountered a Black individual. The authors used two implicit tasks and process dissociation analysis, which allowed them to separate contributions of automatic and controlled thinking to task performance. Of importance, the reduction in stereotyping was driven by a change in automatic stereotyping and not controlled thinking. This benefit was acquired with little practice and generalized to novel faces. Thus, implementation intentions may be an effective and efficient means for controlling automatic aspects of thought.

Stereotypes as dominant responses: on the "social facilitation" of prejudice in anticipated public contexts.

This article challenges the highly intuitive assumption that prejudice should be less likely in public compared with private settings. It proposes that stereotypes may be conceptualized as a type of dominant response (C. L. Hull, 1943; R. B. Zajonc, 1965) whose expression may be enhanced in public settings, especially among individuals high in social anxiety. Support was found for this framework in an impression formation paradigm (Experiment 1) and in a speeded task designed to measure stereotypic errors in perceptual identification (Experiment 2). Use of the process dissociation procedure (B. K. Payne, L. L. Jacoby, & A. J. Lambert, in press) demonstrated that these effects were due to decreases in cognitive control rather than increases in stereotype accessibility. The findings highlight a heretofore unknown and ironic consequence of anticipated public settings: Warning people that others may be privy to their responses may actually increase prejudice among the very people who are most worried about doing the wrong thing in public.