Neural mechanisms of prejudice control

Despite holding egalitarian beliefs, many low-prejudice individuals have trouble inhibiting the influence of automatic racial stereotypes on their behavior.  Drawing from recent neurocognitive models, I hypothesized that variability in behavior among low-prejudice people could be explained by a preconscious mechanism for detecting conflict between automatic race-biased tendencies and egalitarian intentions.  Although this conflict-detection process cannot be self-reported or reliably inferred from behavior, it may be measured during the course of a response using event-related brain potentials (ERPs).  Low-prejudice participants representing good and poor regulators of race bias, and high-prejudice participants (i.e., non-regulators), completed a sequential priming task that required stereotype inhibition on some trials but not others, while EEG was recorded.  Results revealed greater behavioral control for good vs. poor regulators throughout the task.  Moreover, good regulators exhibited stronger neural signals associated with detecting unwanted bias, and this neural activity accounted for group differences in behavioral control.  These results suggest that some low-prejudice people fail to control prejudiced behavior because automatic stereotypes are not preconsciously appraised as conflicting with egalitarian intentions.  I have extended this line of research to examine the mechanism through with situational pressures to respond without prejudice lead to greater behavioral control.  My findings suggest that situational influences on behavior operate via a second mechanism for detecting the need for control – one that is active in the earliest stages of conscious awareness and may also be measured using ERPs.  Taken together, this work examines mechanisms of control not previously studied in social psychology, but which shed light on questions of prejudice control and, more broadly, the regulation of social behavior.