What's In a Name? Priming Effects on Implicit Prejudices

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What’s in a Name? Priming Effects on Implicit Prejudices
The proposed study aims to investigate the relationship between implicit prejudices and their effect on perception and judgment of others. Individuals generally hold specific prejudices towards their ingroups and outgroups and these can be deliberately or subconsciously expressed through explicit or implicit attitudes, respectively. Learning more about the relationship between the subconscious prejudicial attitudes people hold and how these affect perceptions of others is important if a better understanding of intergroup relations is to be made. More specifically, and relevant to the study at hand, investigating implicit prejudices White individuals have and how these affect their perceptions and impressions of stereotyped groups such as Black individuals, has important implications for how these perceptions shape behavior and social interactions between these two groups.
For example, Payne (2001) found that priming individuals with Black and White faces affected participants’ subsequent identification of objects as guns or tools. Results showed that priming of Black individuals led to a faster identification of guns, and a higher misinterpretation of tools for guns as opposed to those primed with White faces. In addition, Higgins, Rhodes & Jones (1977), demonstrated that priming specific traits influenced subsequent ratings and recall of information of an individual based on a written description, such that priming negative traits led to a more negative impression formation and characterization of the person stimulus. Applying this idea to Black and White word primes, Wittenbrink, Judd & Park (1997) showed that when individuals were semantically primed with either the wor...

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...Category accessibility and impression formation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 13(2), 141-154. doi: 10.1016/S0022-1031(77)80007-3
Payne, K.B. (2001). Prejudice and Perception: the Role of Automatic and
Controlled Processes in Misperceiving a Weapon. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81(2), 181-192. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.81.2.181
Todd, A.R., Galinksy, A.D., & Bodenhousen, G.V. (2012). Perspective taking undermines stereotype maintenance processes: Evidence from social memory, behavior explanation, and information solicitation. Social Cognition 30(1), 94-108. doi:http://dx.doi.org/101521soco201230194
Wittenbrink, B., Judd, C.M., & Park, B. (1997). Evidence for Racial Prejudice at the Implicit Level and Its Relationship With Questionnaire Measures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72(2), 262-274. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.72.2.262

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