Whites Are Granted the American Identity More Swiftly than Asians

The present research strives to identify one possible mechanism accounting for the American = White effect. In three experiments, a sequential priming task was used to examine the influence of Asian or White faces on the categorization of American or foreign landmarks. Process dissociation analyses revealed a stronger automatic tendency to respond “American” after White faces than after Asian faces when executive control failed (Experiments 1–3). This effect was not moderated by a manipulation of processing time (Experiment 2); it was, however, eradicated after completion of a training phase counteracting the American = White linkage (Experiment 3). The findings suggest that the pervasive propensity to equate American with White operates as an automatic accessibility bias.