The role of awareness: Divergent automatic stereotype activation and implicit judgment correction

Two experiments investigated automatic stereotype activation and its correction. In Experiment I (n = 57) the category "Blacks" was primed using a lexical decision task. People high and low in prejudice subsequently formed divergent impressions of the target person. Replicating previous findings (Lepore & Brown, 1997), high-prejudice participants' judgments were more negative and low-prejudice people's ratings more positive. Awareness of a connection between priming and impression formation reversed this pattern. Experiment 2 (n = 40) revealed that awareness of a connection, irrespective of priming recall, promoted a correction of the judgment. Unaware high-and low-prejudice participants again showed divergent automatic stereotype activation, but aware respondents corrected their judgments in opposite directions. Thus, when automatic stereotype activation is differentiated, implicit correction processes act upon different accessible knowledge, resulting in divergent judgment corrections. Implications for stereotyping and models of contrast effects are discussed.