The Effect of Emotion on Automatic Intergroup Attitudes

Two experiments provide initial evidence that specific emotional states are capable of creating automatic prejudice toward outgroups. Specifically, we propose that anger should influence automatic evaluations of outgroups because of its functional relevance to intergroup conflict and competition, whereas other negative emotions less relevant to intergroup relations (e.g., sadness) should not. In both experiments, after minimal ingroups and outgroups were created, participants were induced to experience anger, sadness, or a neutral state. Automatic attitudes toward the inand outgroups were then assessed using an evaluative priming measure (Experiment 1) and the Implicit Association Test (Experiment 2). As predicted, results showed that anger created automatic prejudice toward the outgroup, whereas sadness and neutrality resulted in no automatic intergroup bias. The implications of these findings for emotion-induced biases in implicit intergroup cognition in particular, and in social cognition in general, are considered. Since the heyday of frustration-aggression and scapegoating theories of prejudice (e.g., Dollard, Doob, Miller, Mowrer, & Sears, 1939), social psychologists have recognized that intergroup relations, and the stereotypes and prejudices that inevitably accompany them, are influenced by perceivers’ emotional states. As in the case of attitudes more generally, emotions have been found to influence when, and to what extent, people express positive or negative attitudes toward, and beliefs about, members of inand outgroups (Bodenhausen, Mussweiler, Gabriel, & Moreno, 2001; Fiske, 1998; cf. Petty, DeSteno, & Rucker, 2001). For example, anger and happiness are known to enhance heuristic processing of social information that, in turn, exacerbates stereotypic judgments of outgroups (Bodenhausen, Sheppard, & Kramer, 1994; Tiedens & Linton, 2001). Sadness, however, has been shown to promote systematic processing of information that, in turn, decreases stereotypic judgments (Lambert, Khan, Lickel, & Fricke, 1997). These and similar findings have led to wide acceptance of the view that specific emotions can influence people’s beliefs about social groups. It is important to note, however, that thus far, the growing corpus of research on emotion and intergroup cognition has focused exclusively on the effects of emotion on self-reported, or explicit, judgments of social groups (for a review, see Bodenhausen et al., 2001). Such judgments involve conscious deliberation and are, therefore, clearly under perceivers’ voluntary control. Indeed, if people suspect that incidental emotion may unduly influence an unrelated judgment, they often correct for the perceived bias (Lambert et al., 1997; cf. DeSteno, Petty, Wegener, & Rucker, 2000). Moreover, happy individuals, who typically engage in heuristic processing, are able to process systematically when instructed to do so (Queller, Mackie, & Stroessner, 1996) or when counterstereotypic information motivates them to do so (Bless, Schwarz, & Wieland, 1996). Such control, however, is not available for all types of judgments, especially automatic ones (Banaji & Dasgupta, 1998; Greenwald & Banaji, 1995). In the domain of intergroup cognition, automatic attitudes stand as an unconscious analogue to self-reported or conscious attitudes; that is, they represent evaluations of social groups whose initiation and modification typically operate without volitional control (Fazio & Towles-Schwen, 1999; Greenwald & Banaji, 1995). Understanding the conditions that lead to the formation and exacerbation of automatic prejudice is important not only because of its pervasiveness, but also because of accumulating evidence that automatic prejudice does not remain confined to mental life—it diffuses into people’s behavior toward outgroup members (Dovidio, Kawakami, & Gaertner, 2002; Fazio, Jackson, Dunton, & Williams, 1995; McConnell & Leibold, 2001). We believe that people’s emotional states at the time of intergroup judgment ought to influence their automatic evaluations of social groups by moderating or even creating intergroup biases outside of awareness. This hypothesis stems from a functional view of emotions as phenomena designed to increase adaptive responding to environmentally significant stimuli (Damasio, 1994; Keltner & Gross, 1999; LeDoux, 1996). From an adaptiveness standpoint, it seems The first two authors contributed equally to this work. Address correspondence to David DeSteno, Department of Psychology, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115, e-mail: d.desteno@ neu.edu, or to Nilanjana Dasgupta, Department of Psychology, Tobin Hall, 135 Hicks Way, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003, e-mail: [email protected]. The influence of emotion on cognition and behavior is theorized to produce adaptive responses that prepare organisms to meet environmental challenges. However, the influence of emotions may also diffuse into new situations; that is, a preexisting or incidental emotion may influence interactions with a subsequent target (cf. Bodenhausen et al., 2001; Petty et al., 2001). Any biases that stem from the influence of incidental emotions on judgments of subsequent targets need not represent an adaptive response. PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE Volume 15—Number 5 319 Copyright r 2004 American Psychological Society reasonable to expect that specific emotions should facilitate people’s ability to evaluate social groups quickly and automatically, as well as slowly and carefully. We predict that to the extent that outgroups often signify sources of conflict, competition, or blockage of goals (Brewer & Brown, 1998; Neuberg & Cottrell, 2002), and to the extent that emotions help individuals meet environmental challenges by activating goal-driven action tendencies (Frijda, 1986; LeDoux, 1996), emotions that prepare organisms to meet challenges related to conflict or competition (e.g., anger) should bias automatic intergroup evaluations in accord with these functional goals. EMOTION AND AUTOMATIC INTERGROUP ATTITUDES Although no evidence directly bears on this hypothesis, findings from three lines of research lend credence to the idea that emotion ought to shape automatic attitudes toward social groups. First, cognitive neuroscience research has begun to identify subcortical structures involved in automatic evaluative appraisals of social groups (Phelps et al., 2000) and has found these structures to be reciprocally linked to both cortical and subcortical regions of the brain involved in the experience of emotion (Ochsner, Bunge, Gross, & Gabrieli, 2002). Such reciprocal pathways suggest not only that automatic appraisals of particular stimuli can trigger emotion, but also that extant emotional states can influence subsequent appraisals. Given these linkages, it is possible that an emotional state renders individuals more vigilant against certain threats in the environment and that such vigilance modulates subsequent automatic evaluations of relevant social stimuli. Because automatic evaluations facilitate rapid responses when strategic analysis is unavailable, it seems reasonable to expect that these responses may be an important medium through which emotions allow organisms to meet environmental challenges; for example, certain emotion-driven automatic responses may act as the first line of defense against threatening stimuli. Second, the functional view of emotion readily extends into the realm of intergroup relations. Recent work has begun to find that appraisals of social groups evoke specific emotional states, goals, and action tendencies that facilitate the successful negotiation of group interactions (Mackie & Smith, 2002). Given this link between social groups and specific emotions, it is conceivable that the experience of such emotions, even when their source is incidental to intergroup relations, may influence people’s perceptions of inand outgroups in accord with their functional significance. Finally, for emotion-based moderation of automatic intergroup attitudes to occur, such attitudes must show some degree of flexibility. Recent research has supported this view, providing evidence that automatic beliefs and attitudes toward groups are not as immutable as previously theorized, but rather are quite sensitive to external cues such as social context (Dasgupta & Greenwald, 2001; Wittenbrink, Judd, & Park, 2001). Consequently, emotion, given its context-relevant signaling value, ought to act as an internal cue capable of moderating automatic intergroup attitudes.