Bringing automatic stereotyping under control: Implementation intentions as efficient means of thought control

Evidence of automatic racial bias raises the question of whether, and how, unintended biases initiated in milliseconds can be brought under intentional control. Past research investigating people’s ability to control automatic bias has produced mixed findings. The current research tested the utility of an implementation intention, a promising strategy for reducing the effects of automatic bias on behavior. An implementation intention is an if-then plan that links an environmental cue to a specific response; it is hypothesized to automate the execution of the response intention when the cue is encountered. In the first two experiments, participants were asked to identify an object (e.g., gun or tool) after being presented with either an African American or a Caucasian face. Half of the participants formed a counter-stereotypical implementation intention to think the word, “safe”, when they saw Black faces. Participants in the control condition received an implementation intention that was not associated with the relevant racial stereotype. These experiments demonstrated that automatic stereotyping was reduced only when participants had formed a counter-stereotypical implementation intention, even though all participants had been warned about being biased. A process dissociation analysis determined the separate contributions of automatic and controlled influences on task performance. The effect of the counter-stereotypical intention on stereotyping occurred via a reduction in automatic stereotype bias and not differences in controlled thinking (Experiments 1 and 2). This was the first demonstration of automatic bias being reduced in this weapon identification paradigm. Experiment 2 showed that this benefit was acquired with little practice and it generalized to novel faces (i.e., photos of Black faces that had not been presented during the intention rehearsal phase). Experiments 3 and 4 examined another consequence of the counter-stereotypical intention, the possibility that it may reduce visual attention to objects associated with the intended social category. In these experiments, a dot-probe methodology revealed that a counter-stereotypical implementation intention reduced visual attention to stereotype-congruent objects after participants had seen a Black individual. Overall, these four experiments demonstrated that an implementation intention may be an effective and efficient means for controlling automatic aspects of thought and for controlling visual attention.