Automatic preference for white Americans: Eliminating the familiarity explanation

Using the Implicit Association Test (IAT), recent experiments have demonstr ated a strong and automatic positive evaluation of White Americans and a re latively negative evaluation of African Americans. Interpretations of this finding as revealing pro-White attitudes rest critically on tests of altern ative interpretations, the most obvious one being perceivers' greater famil iarity with stimuli representing Whit, Americans. The reported experiment d emonstrated that positive attributes were more strongly associated with Whi te than Black Americans even when (a) pictures of equally unfamiliar Black and White individuals were used as stimuli and (b) differences in stimulus familiarity were statistically controlled. This experiment indicates that a utomatic race associations captured by the IAT are not compromised by stimu lus familiarity, which in turn strengthens the conclusion that the IAT meas ures automatic evaluative associations. (C) 2000 Academic Press.