Counterstereotypic exemplars in context: Evidence for intracategory differentiation using implicit measures

Most of the implicit attitude literature of the past 15 years has focused on people's automatized attitudes toward broad social categories, especially those pertaining to stigmatized outgroups (e. g., blacks). In the present research, we examined implicit attitudes toward the individuals who belong to those social categories. In particular, we used implicit as well as explicit measures in order to understand the dynamics by which people make meaningful distinctions among the members of the outgroup (i.e., intracategory differentiation), and to understand those aspects of the social context that might moderate people's ability to make these distinctions. Findings showed that participants' ability to distinguish between a highly successful black executive and another anonymous black male systematically varied as a function of whether interracial (White-black) distinctions were salient or not. however, the nature of these effects depended on whether impressions were assessed using implicit or explicit attitude tasks. Implications for theory and research on impression formation and the implicit attitude literature are discussed.