About the impact of automaticity in the minimal group paradigm: evidence from affective priming tasks

Abstract

Two experiments examined whether novel, minimal ingroups are automatically associated with positive aect while outgroups do not elicit such positive evaluative default. Participants were assigned to social categories in a typical minimal group setting and subsequently administered a masked priming task, i.e. prime words were not consciously recognized. Following either the presentation of a priori positive or negative words or the presentation of the group labels, participants classi®ed adjectives with regard to their valence ( positive/negative). In Experiment 1, a standard aective priming paradigm was realized with response latencies as dependent measures; in Experiment 2, a response window technique was used, with errors as crucial measure. In both studies, signi®cant aective congruency eects emerged similarly for standard primes and category labels, indicating ingroup bias on an implicit level.

Is There an "I" in "Team"? The Role of the Self in Group-Serving Judgments.

“…This finding speaks to questions raised about the cause of an implicit in-group bias (Otten & Wentura, 1999). That is, not only did we observe evidence that the self is used as an anchor in implicit judgments about one's group, but we showed as well that this process is limited by the motivational pressures affecting the self.…”

Associative and propositional processes in evaluation: An integrative review of implicit and explicit attitude change.

“…As with research on EC, such effects were originally demonstrated for explicit attitudes. Recent research found similar effects for implicit attitudes (e.g., Ashburn-Nardo et al, 2001;Castelli et al, 2004;DeSteno et al, 2004;Otten & Wentura, 1999;Pratto & Shih, 2000). Even though there is no evidence for a particular pattern of mediation available yet, the APE model implies that minimal group situations may change associative evaluations of the in-group, which then provide a basis for evaluative judgments about the in-group.…”

When the method makes a difference: Antagonistic effects on “automatic evaluations” as a function of task characteristics of the measure

“…More precisely, such "implicit" measures allow one to infer evaluations from response latencies or error rates, typically in speeded categorization Based on evidence that automatic evaluations assessed by these measures reliably predict judgments and behavior (for a review, see , researchers became increasingly interested in questions pertaining to their origin and change (Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006;Petty, Briñol, & DeMarree, 2007;Rudman, 2004;Wilson, Lindsey, & Schooler, 2000). For instance, with regard to their origin, researchers have explored the roles of evaluative conditioning (e.g., Olson, & Fazio, 2001), cognitive balance (e.g., Gawronski, Walther & Blank, 2005a), and ingroup favoritism (e.g., Otten & Wentura, 1999). Moreover, research addressing change in automatic evaluations has investigated various mechanisms, including cognitive dissonance (e.g., Gawronski & Strack, 2004), attitude-related education programs (e.g., Rudman, Ashmore, & Gary, 2001), and extended training in negating evaluative responses (e.g., Gawronski, Deutsch, Mbirkou, Seibt, & Strack, 2008a;Kawakami, Dovidio, Moll, & Hermsen, 2000).…”