Jack Glaser

A controlled experiment tested the possibility that racial profiling— disproportionate scrutiny of a minority racial group by sanctioned authorities—would have a “reverse deterrent” effect on the illicit behavior of members of a nonprofiled majority group. Research participants given a task involving extremely difficult anagrams were given the opportunity to cheat. White participants randomly assigned to a condition in which two Black confederates were obtrusively singled out for scrutiny by the study administrator cheated more than Whites in a White-profiling condition and a no-profiling control condition, and more than Black participants in all three conditions. Black participants cheated at comparable levels across the three experimental conditions. The effect of the profiling of Blacks was consequently a net increase in cheating. The results indicate that racial profiling may be counterproductive.

In this article, we respond at length to recent critiques of research on implicit bias, especially studies using the Implicit
Association Test (IAT). Tetlock and Mitchell (2009) claim that ‘‘there is no evidence that the IAT reliably predicts class-wide
discrimination on tangible outcomes in any setting,’’ accuse their colleagues of violating ‘‘the injunction to separate factual from
value judgments,’’ adhering blindly to a ‘‘statist interventionist’’ ideology, and of conducting a witch-hunt against implicit racists,
sexists, and others. These and other charges are specious. Far from making ‘‘extraordinary claims’’ that ‘‘require extraordinary
evidence,’’ researchers have identified the existence and consequences of implicit bias through well-established methods based
upon principles of cognitive psychology that have been developed in nearly a century’s worth of work. We challenge the blanket
skepticism and organizational complacency advocated by Tetlock and Mitchell and summarize 10 recent studies that no manager
(or managerial researcher) should ignore. These studies reveal that students, nurses, doctors, police officers, employment recruiters,
and many others exhibit implicit biases with respect to race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, social status, and other distinctions.
Furthermore—and contrary to the emphatic assertions of the critics—participants’ implicit associations do predict socially and
organizationally significant behaviors, including employment, medical, and voting decisions made by working adults.
# 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

This research examines whether spontaneous, unintentional discriminatory behavior can be moderated by an implicit (nonconscious) motivation to control prejudice. We operationalize implicit motivation to control prejudice (IMCP) in terms of an implicit negative attitude toward prejudice (NAP) and an implicit belief that oneself is prejudiced (BOP). In the present experiment, an implicit stereotypic association of Blacks (vs. Whites) with weapons was positively correlated with the tendency to “shoot” armed Black men faster than armed White men (the “Shooter Bias”) in a computer simulation. However, participants relatively high in implicit negative attitude toward prejudice showed no relation between the race-weapons stereotype and the shooter bias. Implicit belief that oneself is prejudiced had no direct eVect on this relation, but the interaction of NAP and BOP did. Participants who had a strong association between self and prejudice (high BOP) but a weak association between prejudice and bad (low NAP) showed the strongest relation between the implicit race-weapons stereotype and the Shooter Bias, suggesting that these individuals freely employed their stereotypes in their behavior.

The role of Implicit motivation to Control prejudice (ImCp) in moderating
the effect of resource depletion on spontaneous discriminatory behavior
was examined. Cognitive resource depletion was manipulated by having
participants solve either difficult or easy anagrams. A “Shooter Task” measuring unintended racial discriminatory behavior followed. participants
then reported their subjective experiences in the task. Finally, ImCp and
an implicit race-weapons stereotype were measured, both using Go/no-go
Association Tasks (GnATs). ImCp moderated the effect of depletion on discriminatory behavior: depletion resulted in more racial bias in the Shooter
Task only for those who scored low in our measure of ImCp, while high
ImCp participants performed comparably in both the low and high depletion conditions.

Analyzing political conservatism as motivated social cognition integrates theories of personality (authoritarianism, dogmatism–intolerance of ambiguity), epistemic and existential needs (for closure,
regulatory focus, terror management), and ideological rationalization (social dominance, system justification). A meta-analysis (88 samples, 12 countries, 22,818 cases) confirms that several psychological
variables predict political conservatism: death anxiety (weighted mean r
.50); system instability (.47);
dogmatism–intolerance of ambiguity (.34); openness to experience (–.32); uncertainty tolerance (–.27);
needs for order, structure, and closure (.26); integrative complexity (–.20); fear of threat and loss (.18);
and self-esteem (–.09). The core ideology of conservatism stresses resistance to change and justification
of inequality and is motivated by needs that vary situationally and dispositionally to manage uncertainty
and threat.

We conducted semistructured interviews with 38 participants in White racist Internet chat rooms, examining the extent to which people would, in this unique environment, advocate interracial violence in response to purported economic and cultural threats. Capitalizing on the anonymity and candor of chat room interactions, this study provides an unusual perspective on extremist attitudes. We experimentally manipulated the nature and proximity of the threats. Qualitative and quantitative analyses indicate that the respondents were most threatened by interracial marriage and, to a lesser extent, Blacks moving into White neighborhoods. In contrast, job competition posed by Blacks evoked very little advocacy of violence. The study affords an assessment of the advantages and limitations of Internet-based research with clandestine populations.