The effects of group affiliation vs. individuating information on direct and indirect measures of the evaluation of novel individual group members

Automatic evaluation has emerged as a central concept in contemporary thinking about prejudice. The present research tested the quintessential aspect of prejudice: Does group affiliation dominate automatic evaluation of individual group members even when diagnostic evaluative information about the individuals is available? Participants read about the behaviors of two individuals: one from a typically liked group and one from a typically disliked group, portraying one individual as more positive than the other, and manipulating the extremity and direction of that difference. We conducted six studies (Total N = 11,572, with samples consisting of adults residing in the U.S.), across different group types (age, gender, or race), and indirect measures that purportedly measure automatic evaluation (the Implicit Association Test [IAT] and the Evaluative Priming Task [EPT]). Group affiliation (relatively to personal characteristics) influenced the IAT and the EPT more than it influenced the self-reported evaluation. These results may suggest that automatic evaluation of individuals is more prejudiced than nonautomatic evaluation.