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Automatic Preference for White Americans: Eliminating the Familiarity Explanation,☆☆

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Abstract

Using the Implicit Association Test (IAT), recent experiments have demonstrated a strong and automatic positive evaluation of White Americans and a relatively negative evaluation of African Americans. Interpretations of this finding as revealing pro-White attitudes rest critically on tests of alternative interpretations, the most obvious one being perceivers' greater familiarity with stimuli representing White Americans. The reported experiment demonstrated that positive attributes were more strongly associated with White than Black Americans even when (a) pictures of equally unfamiliar Black and White individuals were used as stimuli and (b) differences in stimulus familiarity were statistically controlled. This experiment indicates that automatic race associations captured by the IAT are not compromised by stimulus familiarity, which in turn strengthens the conclusion that the IAT measures automatic evaluative associations.

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    This research was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (SBR-9422242, SBR-9710172, SBR-9422241, and SBR-9709924) and from the National Institute of Mental Health (MH-41328, MH-01533, and MH-57672). The authors thank William Cunningham and Scott Ottaway for their comments on an earlier draft.

    ☆☆

    Address correspondence and reprint requests to Nilanjana Dasgupta, Department of Psychology, New School University, Graduate Faculty, 65 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10003, e-mail: [email protected]; Debbie E. McGhee and Anthony G. Greenwald, Department of Psychology, University of Washington, P.O. Box 351525, Seattle, WA 98195-1525, e-mail: [email protected] or [email protected]; or Mahzarin R. Banaji, Department of Psychology, Yale University, P.O. Box 208205, New Haven, CT 06520-8205, e-mail: [email protected].

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