Rh. Fazio et al., VARIABILITY IN AUTOMATIC ACTIVATION AS AN UNOBTRUSIVE MEASURE OF RACIAL-ATTITUDES - A BONA-FIDE PIPELINE, Journal of personality and social psychology, 69(6), 1995, pp. 1013-1027
The research examines an unobtrusive measure of racial attitudes based
on the evaluations that are automatically activated from memory on th
e presentation of Black versus White faces. Study 1, which concerned t
he technique's validity, obtained different attitude estimates for Bla
ck and White participants and also revealed that the variability among
White participants was predictive of other race-related judgments and
behavior. Study 2 concerned the lack of correspondence between the un
obtrusive estimates and Modern Racism Scale (MRS) scores. The reactivi
ty of the MRS was demonstrated in Study 3. Study 4 observed an interac
tion between the unobtrusive estimates and an individual difference in
motivation to control prejudiced reactions when predicting MRS scores
. The theoretical implications of the findings for consideration of au
tomatic and controlled components of racial prejudice are discussed, a
s is the status of the MRS.