Jimmy Calanchini

Reducing Implicit Racial Preferences: II. Intervention Effectiveness Across Time

Implicit preferences are malleable, but does that change last? We tested 9 interventions (8 real and 1 sham) to reduce implicit racial preferences over time. In 2 studies with a total of 6,321 participants, all 9 interventions immediately reduced implicit preferences. However, none were effective after a delay of several hours to several days. We also found that these interventions did not change explicit racial preferences and were not reliably moderated by motivations to respond without prejudice. Short-term malleability in implicit preferences does not necessarily lead to long-term change, raising new questions about the flexibility and stability of implicit preferences. (PsycINFO Database Record

Disproportionate use of lethal force in policing is associated with regional racial biases of residents

Due to a lack of data, the demographic and psychological factors associated with lethal force by police officers have remained insufficiently explored. We develop the first predictive models of lethal force by integrating crowd-sourced and fact-checked lethal force databases with regional demographics and measures of geolocated implicit and explicit racial biases collected from 2,156,053 residents across the United States. Results indicate that only the implicit racial prejudices and stereotypes of White residents, beyond major demographic covariates, are associated with disproportionally more use of lethal force with Blacks relative to regional base rates of Blacks in the population. Thus, the current work provides the first macropsychological statistical models of lethal force, indicating that the context in which police officers work is significantly associated with disproportionate use of lethal force.

Attitudinal and Non-Attitudinal Components of IAT Performance

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) was designed to measure automatically activated attitudinal associations, free of the influence of processes that affect their expression. Subsequent research has shown that IAT performance also is influenced by non-associative processes, but the extent to which these non-associative processes are content-specific or if they operate similarly regardless of the attitude being measured has largely gone unexamined. In the current research, participants completed pairs of IATs that varied in conceptual overlap: Tests shared a high, moderate, or low degree of overlap in the measured attitudes. The Quad model was applied to estimate the contributions of four processes to IAT performance. Evidence was found for two relatively general, non-attitudinal processes and two relatively attitude-specific processes. Implications are discussed for interpretation of IAT scores, individual differences in IAT scores, and IAT score malleability.

How malleable is categorization by race? Evidence for competitive category use in social categorization.

We contrast 3 theoretical viewpoints concerning the factors affecting social categorization by race: (a) the classical theory of social categorization highlighting the role of a priori accessibility and situational factors, (b) the classical theory augmented by a principle of competitive category use, and (c) competition between race (but not gender) and coalition with race (but not gender) encoded only as a proxy to coalition. Study 1 documents a confound that renders important portions of previous research difficult to interpret. In Studies 2 and 3, race categorization was stronger than categorization by more weakly accessible categories when situational support in terms of topic relevance was comparable across categories. A situational focus on race further increased race categorization. Race categorization was reduced in the presence of strongly cued cross-cutting coalitions. Race categorization also was depressed when situational factors promoted comparative processing of cross-cutting categories while cues to potential coalitional divisions were held constant (Study 4). Accessibility, topic relevance, and cuing cross-cutting coalitions had the same effects on gender categorization as found for race categorization (Study 5). Taken together, the results suggest that classical theories of social categorization have to be augmented by a principle of competitive category use that is not limited to a competition between race and coalition.

Reducing Prejudice Across Cultures via Social Tuning

This research examines whether culture influences the extent to which people’s attitudes tune toward others’ egalitarian beliefs. Hong Kong Chinese, but not American, participants were less prejudiced, explicitly and implicitly, toward homosexuals when they interacted with a person who appeared to hold egalitarian views as opposed to neutral views (Experiment 1). In Experiments 2 and 3, cultural concepts were manipulated. Americans and Hong Kong Chinese who were primed with a collectivist mind-set showed less explicit and implicit prejudice when the experimenter was thought to endorse egalitarian views than when no views were conveyed. Such differences were not found when both cultural groups were primed with an individualist mind-set. These findings suggest that cultural value orientations can help mitigate prejudice.

Intoxicated prejudice: The impact of alcohol consumption on implicitly and explicitly measured racial attitudes

Recent research has shown that alcohol consumption can exacerbate expressions of racial bias by increasing reliance on stereotypes. However, little work has investigated how alcohol affects intergroup evaluations. The current work sought to address the issue in the context of the correspondence between implicit and explicit measures of anti-Black attitudes. Participants were randomly assigned to consume an alcoholic (target BrAC of 0.08%), placebo, or control beverage prior to completing implicit and explicit measures of racial attitudes. Although beverage condition did not affect prejudice levels on either measure, it did change the correlation between them. Implicitly measured attitudes significantly predicted explicit reports of prejudice and discrimination only for participants who consumed alcohol. We discuss the implications of our findings for debates regarding dissociations between implicit and explicit measures and the cultural phenomenon of intoxicated individuals attributing prejudiced statements to alcohol consumption rather than personal attitudes.