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Prejudice and perception: The role of automatic and controlled processes in misperceiving a weapon.
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2001
Year
Controlled ProcessesBehavioral Decision MakingSocial PsychologyRacial PrejudiceCognitionSocial SciencesPsychologyBiasPrejudiceCognitive Bias MitigationUnconscious BiasCognitive ScienceBehavioral SciencesManipulation (Psychology)Experimental PsychologySocial CognitionSocial BiasSocial JudgmentArts
The study used a priming paradigm across two experiments to examine how racial cues affect weapon perception, with Experiment 2 imposing a rapid response deadline that shifted the bias from reaction time to accuracy. Results showed that racial primes accelerated gun identification and increased tool‑to‑gun misidentifications, with automatic processing driving the bias while controlled processing remained unaffected; a rapid response deadline reduced controlled estimates, and the desire to control prejudice moderated the link between explicit prejudice and automatic bias.
Two experiments used a priming paradigm to investigate the influence of racial cues on the perceptual identification of weapons. In Experiment 1, participants identified guns faster when primed with Black faces compared with White faces. In Experiment 2, participants were required to respond quickly, causing the racial bias to shift from reaction time to accuracy. Participants misidentified tools as guns more often when primed with a Black face than with a White face. L. L. Jacoby's (1991) process dissociation procedure was applied to demonstrate that racial primes influenced automatic (A) processing, but not controlled (C) processing. The response deadline reduced the C estimate but not the A estimate. The motivation to control prejudice moderated the relationship between explicit prejudice and automatic bias. Implications are discussed on applied and theoretical levels.