Best laid plans: Effects of goals on accessibility bias and cognitive control in race-based misperceptions of weapons

This study applied process dissociation (PD) to investigate the role of conscious goals in controlling automatic influences of stereotypes. A priming procedure was used to show that the presence of Black (vs. White) faces caused stereotypical misidentifications of objects. Specifically, Black primes caused lures to be misidentified as weapons, whereas White primes caused weapons to be misidentified as non-threatening objects. By manipulating the goals with which participants completed the experiment, we demonstrated that the stereotype bias was invariant across conscious goals to avoid vs. use the influence of race. PD analysis provided three major insights. First, the impact of race was mediated solely through an unintentional accessibility bias. Second, requiring participants to respond rapidly increased the impact of stereotypes, an effect that was mediated by a reduction in controlled discrimination among stimuli. Finally, calling attention to race increased the stereotype accessibility bias, regardless of whether race was made salient with the intention to use, or the intention to avoid the influence of race.