Motivations to Control Prejudice Bias Performance Feedback in Developmental Relationships

In developmental relationships, providing accurate assessments of performance is necessary to maximize the developmental benefits for those receiving the feedback. Research suggests that performance assessments for underrepresented minorities are susceptible to biases related to out-group prejudice; however, little is known about the contributions of motivations to control prejudice, particularly in face-to-face settings. Addressing this, we examined the influences of internal and external motivations to control prejudice (IMS and EMS) on the positivity of White mentor’s feedback about their underrepresented minority mentee’s task performance. We analyzed video-recorded interactions between 56 randomly assigned cross-racial dyads, wherein mentees performed a speech task and were given subsequent face-to-face verbal feedback from their mentor. To gain comparatively unbiased assessments of feedback positivity and of mentee performance, we used independent coders. Using structural equation modeling, our results suggested that positivity of mentors’ feedback was uniquely predicted by both IMS and EMS over and above mentee performance.