Evaluative versus conceptual judgments in automatic stereotyping and prejudice

The goal of the study reported in this article was to examine whether autom atic processes in stereotype and prejudice activation are sensitive to task characteristics of the assessment procedure and whether these influences m ay account for existing inconsistencies that have recently been reported in the literature on automatic racial prejudice. Using a sequential priming p aradigm with subliminal primes ("BLACK" and "WHITE") to examine automatic p rejudice, the study varied the judgment task in which tile priming procedur e was presented. whereas half of the participants were asked to perform a l exical decision task (word/nonword), the remaining participants made evalua tive judgments (good/bad). Results showed reliable influences of the lodgme nt task on the observed pattern of priming effects. Moreover, the priming e ffects found in both conditions replicated the respective results reported in previous research that had used either evaluative or conceptual judgment tasks (Fazio, Jackson, Dunton, & Williams, 1995; Wittenblink, Judd, & Park , 1997). In addition, the response time measure also showed different relat ionships with explicit measures of racial prejudice, depending on the judgm ent condition. In addition to their implications for the assessment of auto matic stereotyping and prejudice these results suggest that automatic respo nses are nut as invariant as it is sometimes posited. (C) 2001 Academic Pre ss.