Automatic Category Activation and Social Behavior: The Moderating Role of Prejudiced Beliefs

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the influence of subliminal primes (faces of Afro-Caribbean and white European people) on social behavior (competitiveness in a Prisoners' Dilemma Game) and whether these automatic category activation effects would be affected by prejudice level. In the first experiment (N = 48), prejudice level was found to significantly moderate the effects of the primes: Priming with Afro-Carribean faces (vs. white faces) tended to decrease competitiveness for low-prejudice participants, compared to high-prejudice participants. In a second experiment (N = 48), this effect was shown to generalize across conditions featuring white versus black experimenters. The results confirm at a behavioral level previous findings with social judgment and lexical decision tasks and support a model in which automatic category activation has divergent effects as a function of preexisting attitudes.