Automatic Antecedents of Discrimination

Abstract

Abstract. In increasingly diverse societies, discrimination against social groups and their members continues to be a public and political concern. Research has addressed three basic cognitive processes that precede discrimination: categorization, stereotype/prejudice activation, and stereotype/prejudice application, suggesting that these processes occur in an automatic fashion. However, there are multiple components of automaticity, including unawareness, efficiency, unintentionality, and uncontrollability. Most of the previous research implies that these components of automaticity converge with respect to cognitive antecedents of discrimination. Here, we review evidence on the distinct components of automaticity in order to assess whether (a) categorization, (b) stereotype/prejudice activation, and (c) stereotype/prejudice application occur (1) without awareness, (2) efficiently, and (3) goal-independently. We highlight evidence indicating convergence or divergence of the automaticity components during each of the processing stages. This analysis provides readers with an up-to-date review that helps to evaluate whether a multi-component approach to automaticity is of additional benefit in aggregating knowledge about the cognitive antecedents of discrimination. We discuss open issues and avenues for future research.

The scholarly impact of diversity research

“…Although some papers might only mention diversity keywords briefly or treat diversity variables as merely control variables, the presence of diversity keywords in titles or abstracts, where readers expect to see only the most crucial information about the paper (Tahamtan & Bormann, 2018), might be sufficient either to mentally link the paper to minorities or to increase the expectation that the paper will mention minorities, activating the stigma‐by‐association effect. Subconscious bias against minorities can surface when relevant cues are present (James et al, 2014; Roth et al, 2019; Skinner & Cheadle, 2016). Later, I ran analyses to compare papers that probed diversity issues as their primary research questions to papers that treated diversity issues as secondary or auxiliary.…”

A recognition advantage for members of higher‐status racial groups

“…For example, financial incentive for Black accuracy combined with high SDO might cancel one another out, leaving only group membership to drive responses. Alternately, to the extent that internal motivations are generally stronger than external motivations (Roth et al, 43), the response tendency produced by high SDO (i.e. to attend to White faces) might overwhelm the response tendency produced by financial incentive for Black accuracy.…”

Age Invariance in Implicit Bias: Alternative Perspectives and Their Implications for the Development of Implicit Cognition

“…Social cognitive theory has long assumed fundamental differences between category availability, activation, and application as antecedents of intergroup behavior in adults (e.g., Krieglmeyer & Sherman, 2012;Roth, Deutsch, & Sherman, 2018), and it would be beneficial to include this perspective in developmental research in order to understand the developmental antecedents and constraints of category acquisition, activation, and application. Similarly, it would be useful to include this developmental perspective in current adult-focused theorizing, thus enlarging the scope of the available learning theories by considerations of category acquisition and use.…”