The present work investigated mechanisms by which Whites' prejudice toward Blacks can be reduced (Study 1) and explored how creating a common ingroup identity can reduce prejudice by promoting these processes (Study 2). In Study 1, White participants who viewed a videotape depicting examples of racial discrimination and who imagined the victim's feelings showed greater decreases in prejudice toward Blacks than did those in the objective and no instruction conditions. Among the potential mediating affective and cognitive variables examined, reductions in prejudice were mediated primarily by feelings associated with perceived injustice. In Study 2, an intervention designed to increase perceptions of a common group identity before viewing the videotape, reading that a terrorist threat was directed at all Americans versus directed just at White Americans, also reduced prejudice toward Blacks through increases in feelings of injustice.

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Two experiments examined effects of heightened awareness of white privilege (illegitimate advantages held by White Americans) and efficacy to reduce racial inequality on White American college students’ attitudes toward African Americans and White Americans. Efficacy to reduce inequality was either measured (Experiment 1) or manipulated (Experiment 2), and heightened white privilege awareness (WPA) was either manipulated (Experiment 1) or held constant (Experiment 2). All participants, except control participants in Experiment 1, read a passage describing their university's under‐representation of African American faculty. Afterward, they wrote letters in support of hiring more African American faculty and were told there was either a 95% or 5% chance their actions would be effective (Experiment 2) or were simply thanked and their perceived efficacy concerning change measured (Experiment 1). Heightened WPA and higher efficacy (measured and manipulated) independently improved participants’ attitudes toward African Americans, but had no effect on their attitudes toward White Americans.

In 2 experiments, Ss judged whether numerous behaviors implied a target trait (intelligent or friendly) and then, on an ostensibly unrelated questionnaire, evaluated the overall desirability of some behaviors. Repeated behaviors were judged more quickly than new ones, even with 7 days between presentations. In addition, evaluations of previously judged behaviors that had evaluatively mixed implications were dominated by their implications for the practiced trait. This implicit memory effect occurred over a 7-day delay, even when Ss did not recognize that they had previously seen the behavior. Just as a general construct (e.g., a trait) can be made accessible by an individual's past experiences, a specific cue-construct linkage (e.g., a tendency to interpret a specific behavior in terms of a particular trait) can be facilitated for a long time, independent of conscious awareness, by making a single judgment.People get better at doing the things they practice. This principle is common knowledge, of course: We all know that a firstgrader who is learning to read by sounding out words letter-byletter will gradually increase his or her speed and fluency at reading. What is not so commonly recognized is the great specificity of the effect of practice. Reading a particular word contributes to the slow global accumulation of speed and reliability of the cognitive processes involved in reading. But it has a much greater effect on the child's ability to read that specific word when it is encountered again in the future.Practice effects are highly specific even in adults for whom general skills (such as reading) are well established. Reading a word once increases the person's ability to read the same word later in a perceptually degraded presentation (e.g., with some letters omitted or presented in a brief flash) for as long as 16 months after the initial presentation (Sloman, Hayman