Priming Race

Recent research shows that racial categorization can be reduced by contexts in which race does not predict how people interact and get along—a manipulation with little to no effect on sex and age. This suggests that our minds attend to race as an implicit cue to how people are likely to get along. However, the underlying mechanism of how these contexts reduce race is not yet known. Is race not encoded? Or, is race encoded, but then inhibited? The present study arbitrates between these possibilities. Results demonstrate that the reduction in racial categorization is happening at recall. Participants are still encoding targets’ race, but this information is locked away or inhibited. This clarifies how the mind switches away from previously relevant, but now irrelevant, social cues: it does not immediately abandon them, rather, it encodes them but inhibits their use.