Internalizing and automatizing motivation to be nonprejudiced: The role of self-determination in stereotyping, prejudice, and intergroup threat

Recent research suggests that people vary in the extent to which their self-regulation of prejudice is self-determined. Furthermore, differences in self-determined prejudice regulation have been shown to predict levels of self-reported prejudice, such that self-determined prejudice regulators display less prejudice than nonself-determined prejudice regulators. Despite this initial evidence, however, the automatic social-cognitive processes involved in the association between motivation to regulate prejudice and prejudice have not yet been examined. Thus, a deeper understanding of the reasons why self-determined prejudice regulation is more effective than nonself-determined prejudice regulation is necessary. To this end, the objective of the present set of studies was twofold. Firstly, differences in the automatization of prejudice regulation among those high and low in self-determined motivation to be nonprejudiced were investigated using two different experimental paradigms {Studies 1, 2, & 3). Secondly, the framework of motivation to be nonprejudiced was expanded by examining the interplay of motivation to regulate prejudice and perceived intergroup threat. In other words, the role of perceived intergroup threat in predicting prejudice was assessed among self-determined and nonselfdetermined prejudice regulators (Studies 4 & 5). Study 1 (7V=62), assessed the basic association between motivation to regulate prejudice and prejudice. In line with hypotheses, self-determined prejudice regulators demonstrated less prejudice than nonself-determined prejudice regulators on both explicit and implicit measures of prejudice. In order to determine whether self-determined prejudice regulation yields less prejudice than nonself-determined prejudice regulation due to automatized selfregulatory processing, the role of motivation to regulate prejudice in the automatic activation and application of stereotypes was examined in Study 2 (JV=84). Results revealed that, although both selfdetermined and nonself-determined prejudice regulators displayed similar levels of stereotype activation, only self-determined prejudice regulators were able to automatically inhibit the application of stereotypes when evaluating a target. To further examine the hypothesis that self-determined prejudice regulation operates implicitly in inhibiting prejudice, Study 3 (JV=135) experimentally assessed the extent to which the different forms of prejudice regulation were affected by self-regulatory depletion. As anticipated, for the self-determined regulators, prejudice regulation did not vary between depleted and non-depleted individuals. However, when nonself-determined prejudice regulators were depleted, prejudice increased, relative to non-depleted controls. It was concluded that the lower levels of prejudice among highly self-determined prejudice regulators is not merely the result of an absence of automatic racial bias, but rather the presence of a superior, automatic prejudice regulating mechanism. In studies 4 and 5, it was hypothesized that nonself-determined motivation to control prejudice would exacerbate the effect of perceived intergroup threat on prejudice. Conversely, selfdetermined motivation to regulate prejudice was expected to reduce the impact of intergroup threat on prejudice. Study 4 (N=122) provided experimental support for this hypothesis by manipulating realistic and symbolic intergroup threat and measuring their impact on various outgroup attitudes. Study 5 (N=255) generalized these findings in a cross-sectional model. Results of both studies supported the hypothesized interaction between motivation and intergroup threat in predicting prejudice. Overall, the present thesis offers promising evidence for the role of self-determined motivation to be nonprejudiced in minimizing prejudice, stereotyping, and the effects of intergroup threat. More fundamentally, results present new insight into the automatization of self-determination, offering promising implications for the reduction of prejudice.