This CAREER project will investigate the psychological construct, Implicit Motivation to Control Prejudice (IMCP), a deeply internalized, largely nonconscious egalitarian orientation. Support for the notion of IMCP comes from the confluence of three established lines of research. First, research has shown that stereotypes and prejudice can reside outside of conscious awareness and give rise to unintended discriminatory behavior. Second, people vary meaningfully in their explicit motivation to control prejudice, as measured using overt questionnaires. Finally, recent research has also shown that people's goals and motives (e.g., to be accurate, to achieve) can operate outside of consciousness. Consequently, motivation to control prejudice should also be able to occur nonconsciously (i.e., implicitly). This is important because only an implicit motivation to control prejudice would effectively serve to inhibit spontaneous, unintended discrimination. The research holds promise to explain why there are differences in spontaneous discriminatory behavior across people, time, and situations. The research examines the generality of the effects of IMCP by testing highly relevant, high impact populations, like police and judges. Unintended, spontaneous biased behaviors are cause for concern, and they have generally been thought to be uncontrollable and therefore inevitable. However, the researcher has developed a method to measure IMCP, finding that it relates negatively to the tendency to engage in discriminatory behavior even when conscious cognitive resources are depleted. Because the researcher teaches courses in the psychology and public policy units, the research on IMCP, and classroom activities and projects derived from that, will effectively enhance instruction across two relevant audiences. Ultimately, findings from this work will lead to the development of interventions to enhance implicit motivation to control prejudice, in the service of reducing discrimination and improving intergroup relations.
This project was designed to investigate a new psychological idea, that people vary in implicit motivation to control prejudice (IMCP). Previous research had shown that people hold stereotypes and prejudices that are implicit (i.e., reside outside of conscious awareness and control); that people also have implicit motives; and that a major part of what determines if people express prejudice or discriminate is the extent to which they are motivated to control prejudice. Because it has been demonstrated that much of discriminatory behavior occurs unintentionally (due to implicit biases that people cannot control and/or may not be aware they have), an implicit motivation to control prejudice would be important in regulating discrimination. The specific objectives of the funded research were to develop a reliable measure of IMCP, test its validity by examining how it relates to things it ought to, like reduced spontaneous discrimination, and investigate its importance for judgments made by influential decisionmakers like police and judges. Early studies indicated that IMCP moderates the relationship between an implicit stereotype and discriminatory behavior; specifically, people high in IMCP show a weaker correlation between their implicit association between Black people and weapons and the tendency to shoot Black people faster than White people (aka "shooter bias"; Glaser & Knowles, 2008) and that people high in IMCP are better able to control their shooter bias even when their mental resources are depleted (Park, Glaser, & Knowles, 2008), indicating that IMCP is indeed implicit. This research also suggests that those high in IMCP are more responsive to training intended to reduce shooter bias (Park & Glaser, 2011). IMCP is only very weakly related to comparable measures of EMCP. IMCP is measured by looking at the interaction of two other implicit associations: an implicit association between the self and prejudice ("I am prejudiced") and an implicit association between prejudice and negativity ("Prejudice is bad"). Those who associate themselves with being prejudiced and think prejudice is bad should (and, the research shows, are) be motivated to control it. When we measure explicit motivation to control prejudice (EMCP) with a questionnaire analog to the computerized, reaction time-based IMCP measures of association, they are only very weakly correlated. In other words, subjects’ agreement with statements like "I am prejudiced" and "Prejudice is bad" only moderately correspond with how they score on the implicit measures. This is not surprising, given that that is a common trend with implicit and explicit measures of sensitive subjects (who wants to admit "I am prejudiced"?). Additional research carried out under this award looked at the relation between IMCP and non-lethal force. The shooter task (and the "shooter bias" score that results from it) is important because it clearly reflects a discriminatory behavior that is unintended, one that stems from implicit bias and automatic responding – it is hard to imagine that there are many, if any, people who intentionally shoot Black people faster than White people. Shooter bias has been tested with, and found in, police officers, so it is clearly consequential and highly relevant to fatal shootings of Black men that prove so destabilizing to communities, families, and police departments. But shooting is very rare, even for police, while non-lethal use of force (e.g., restraining, cuffing) is very commonplace. Accordingly, this project involved the development of a new outcome measure, bias in non-lethal force, by replacing the decision to shoot or not shoot with the decision to subdue or not subdue. Early results indicate that those high in IMCP exhibit less racial bias and that they try to avoid using force in general during the task. Another innovation is the extension of biased policing behaviors to non-force decisions, specifically the decision to stop a pedestrian for investigatory purposes. These are even more common, occurring many thousands of times a day throughout the U.S. Because police stops can lead to arrests, racial discrimination in the decision to stop can cause racial disparities in criminal justice outcomes. This award has funded the intensive process of developing appropriate and valid stimuli to test for bias in the decision to stop. This involved taking thousands of photographs of young Black and White men behaving in manners that varied in suspiciousness, and having police officers evaluate the photographs for realism and suspiciousness. These photos were pared down to a set of 100 matched pairs that are being presented in random order. The participants’ task is to indicate who rises to the level of suspicion that warrants being stopped. We will test for racial bias in these decisions. The procedure will soon be rolled out with police samples. One goal is to use it to measure biased policing. Perhaps more importantly, it will play an instrumental role in a bias-reducing training protocol for police wherein they will use it to reinforce tactics that yield more equitable stopping behaviors.
