Categorization by Race: The Impact of Automatic and Controlled Components of Racial Prejudice

Abstract

The present research examined the influence of both automatic and controlled processes related to racial prejudice on the categorization of stimulus persons by race. Participants judged the similarity of photos of individuals who varied in race, gender, and occupation. These similarity ratings were subjected to a multidimensional scaling procedure. The degree to which individuals weighted race in judging similarity was found to increase as a function of the extent to which race was attitude-evoking for the individual and to decrease as a function of motivation to control seemingly prejudiced reactions. It is suggested that the attention of individuals for whom attitudes were automatically activated in response to Black faces was automatically drawn to the race information, but that individuals motivated to control prejudiced reactions actively resisted weighting race heavily. Examination of the latencies with which the similarity judgments were made provided support for this account of the process underlying categorization by race.