Negotiating Interracial Interactions Costs, Consequences, and Possibilities

The United States is becoming increasingly diverse, yet interracial contact continues to be awkward, if not stressful, for many. Indeed, recent research suggests that individuals often exit interracial interactions feeling drained both cognitively and emotionally. This article reviews research examining how interracial encounters give rise to these outcomes, zeroing in on the mediating role of self-regulation and the moderating influence of prejudice concerns. Given that interracial contact may be the most promising avenue to prejudice reduction, it is important to examine factors that undermine positive interracial contact experiences, as well as those that facilitate them. KEYWORDS—interracial interactions; self-regulation; prejudice As the United States becomes increasingly diverse, contact with individuals of different ethnicities, races, and cultures will no longer be rare. Although increased contact may have positive effects over time (see Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006), there is reason to believe that increased interracial contact may initially result in a host of negative side effects. Research has found, for instance, that interracial interactions induce a relatively malignant form of cardiovascular reactivity in most White individuals (Blascovich, Mendes, Hunter, Lickel, & Kowai-Bell, 2001). Similarly, contact with Whites can impair racial minorities’ psychological and physiological health (Clark, Anderson, Clark, & Williams, 1999). Indeed, interracial interactions are often a source of distress for both Whites and racial minorities (Vorauer & Kumhyr, 2001). Motivated in part by this work, we began to explore potential cognitive consequences of the stress of interracial contact. This investigation built upon previous research examining the effects of exposure to stressful stimuli on cognitive functioning. Performance on tasks that require what is often called cognitive or executive control—for instance tasks that require individuals to ignore distracting information or to inhibit habitual or otherwise automatic reactions—is known to suffer after acute stressful experiences. If interracial interactions are stressful, then they too should impair performance on these tasks. In order to test this hypothesis, we examined White and Black individuals’ performance on a task that is known to require executive control—namely, the Stroop color-naming paradigm— after a brief, interview-like interaction with either a White or Black experimenter (Richeson & Shelton, 2003; Richeson, Trawalter, & Shelton, 2005). Prior to the interaction, participants completed a measure of implicit racial bias (the Implicit Association Test, IAT; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998), which assessed the relative ease with which they could associate positive versus negative words with the White and Black American racial categories; this task is thought to reflect subtle forms of racial bias of which individuals may be unaware. The Stroop task required participants to report the font color (e.g., blue, red) in which a series of words that were also names of colors (e.g., ‘‘blue,’’ ‘‘green’’) were presented on a computer screen. The task assesses executive control when the color names are presented in conflicting font colors (e.g., ‘‘blue’’ in green font) because individuals have to inhibit their dominant tendency to report the color name (i.e., ‘‘blue’’) in favor of the correct response, the font color (i.e., green). Consistent with the prediction that interracial contact stress will undermine subsequent executive control, White individuals, on average, performed more poorly on the Stroop task after contact with a Black experimenter than they did after contact with a White experimenter. Furthermore, the greater White participants’ implicit racial bias, the poorer their Stroop performance after interracial interactions (Fig. 1). Black participants revealed a similar pattern. The more negative participants’ attitudes were toward Whites, the poorer was their performance after interracial, but not same-race, interactions (Richeson et al., Address correspondence to Jennifer A. Richeson, Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, 2029 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208; e-mail: [email protected]. CURRENT DIRECTIONS IN PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE 316 Volume 16—Number 6 Copyright r 2007 Association for Psychological Science 2005). Taken together, this work suggests that, like other stressors, interracial interactions can be cognitively costly. Although provocative, this research does not address how interracial contact undermines subsequent cognitive functioning. We have pursued this question as part of a larger research program investigating dynamics of interracial interactions. One of the insights from this work is the critical role of self-regulation during interracial interactions. In the sections that follow, we review research regarding the mediating role of self-regulation, and the moderating influence of prejudice concerns, in shaping individuals’ experiences. We close our review with a discussion of potential implications of the findings for efforts to create positive contact experiences. A PROCESS MODEL OF INTERRACIAL CONTACT Figure 2 depicts a working model of interracial contact dynamics that integrates biopsychosocial models of interracial interactions (Blascovich et al., 2001; Clark et al., 1999) with recent theories of executive control (Muraven & Baumeister, 2000). Furthermore, the model combines the largely separate literatures regarding racial majorities’ interracial contact experiences and those of minorities. According to the model, interracial contact is often perceived as a stressor, triggering involuntary physiological and behavioral reactions. To cope with these stress reactions and successfully negotiate the interaction, individuals deploy self-regulatory effort. According to recent models of executive control, however, engagement in one task that requires self-regulation (e.g., inhibiting behaviors, thoughts) impairs performance on subsequent tasks tapping the same resource (Muraven & Baumeister, 2000). That is, effortful self-regulation (i.e., self-control) draws upon a central executive attentional resource that can be depleted temporarily. Based on the model, therefore, interracial contact impairs performance on tasks that require executive control because individuals engage in self-control during the interaction, which depletes their executive attentional capacity. In other words, negotiating interracial interactions may leave individuals ill-equipped to perform optimally on any task that requires executive control, including the difficult cognitive tests college students often face but also the multitude of tasks that require willpower and persistence for successful completion. Initial support for this resource-depletion model was garnered from a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study in which White participants were shown facial photographs of Black and White males (Richeson et al., 2003). Although the task involved little executive attentional demand, several brain regions thought to be involved in the inhibition of habitual or dominant responses (e.g., the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex; DLPFC) were relatively more active during exposure to Black faces than they were to White faces. What was most intriguing, however, was that neural activity in response to Black faces in one region of the right DLPFC predicted the extent to which the same individuals were impaired on the Stroop task after an interracial interaction that had occurred more than 2 weeks prior. In other words, when exposed to Black male faces, those individuals who revealed the greatest activity in a brain region known to be involved in executive control were most likely to be impaired on an executive control task after an actual interracial interaction. These results provide compelling evidence for the role of self-regulation during interracial contact in subsequent executive-control failures. Interracial Contact Concerns As shown in Fig. 2, many dispositional and situational factors are likely to moderate the effects of interracial contact on cognition. For instance, race-related attitudes, previous contact experiences, and participants’ situational roles can either increase or decrease the stress of the interaction, as can the need, desire, or ability to regulate one’s stress reactions. To date, our research has largely focused on the influence of individuals’ interracial contact concerns. Specifically, White participants in interracial interactions are often concerned about appearing prejudiced, whereas racial minorities are often concerned about being the target of prejudice and/or about confirming negative group stereotypes. Below, we offer a partial review of our research on the effects of these concerns. 0 50 100 150 200 250 300 −100 0 100 200 300 400 500 600 Pro-White Implicit Racial Bias P re d ic te d S tr o o p In te rf er en ce Black Partner