Impact of Implicit Association Experience and Motivation to Control Prejudice on Stigma

The current study examined the effect of completing implicit association measures as an intervention to alter explicit stigma endorsement, when the intervention varies by mental illness content and implicit evaluation components. Volunteers (N=1549) aged 18-79 at an on-line research site completed either a mental illness, gay/straight, or non-evaluative Brief Implicit Association Test (BIAT) or were in a no intervention control condition before completing measures of explicit stigma toward mentally ill people and motivation to control prejudice. Contrary to hypotheses, intervention condition did not affect explicit stigma endorsement. However, as predicted, internal motivation to control prejudice did interact with intervention condition to alter explicit stigma endorsement. The direction of the effect was unexpected: Participants who were low in internal motivation endorsed significantly more stigma in the gay/straight BIAT condition compared to those in the non-evaluative BIAT condition and the mental illness condition (at the level of a nonsignificant trend). Results suggest the BIAT’s use as a psychoeducational measure to reduce stigma may be more limited than expected. Implicit Association Experience and Stigma 4 Impact of Implicit Association Experience and Motivation to Control Prejudice on Stigma Stigma, the bias against a characteristic perceived as different, leads to the social devaluation of persons regarded as outside the social norm (Goffman, 1963; Hinshaw & Stier, 2008). Stigma can manifest as anything from interference in social interaction and increased social distance from others (Albrecht, Walker & Levy, 1982; Norman et al., 2010) to decreased housing and employment opportunities (Hinshaw & Stier, 2008). People with mental illness are frequently targets of stigma from society at large, often stereotyped as dangerous or responsible for their condition (Link, Phelan, Bresnahan, Stueve, & Pescosolido, 1999). Felt stigma has been shown to have deleterious effects on persons with mental illness, decreasing help-seeking behavior (Schomerus, Matschinger, & Angermeyer, 2008; Vogel, Wade, & Haake, 2006) and predicting poorer outcomes of mental illness even when disability is held constant (Hinshaw & Stier, 2008). This project aims to investigate a novel potential intervention—experience with implicit bias measurement—as a tool to reduce explicit bias against persons with mental illness. Even among people who are not consciously biased, deeply engrained negative bias from socially constructed stereotypes can be automatically activated and result in discriminatory behavior. The Self-regulation of prejudice model (SRP; Monteith, 1993; Monteith, Mark, & Ashburn-Nardo, 2010) suggests that when a person realizes they have responded to a situation in a stigmatizing way that runs contrary to their desire to be non-prejudiced, cues for prejudice control are generated to check future discriminatory responses. For instance, if a person catches herself walking quickly past a homeless person because she assumes that person is mentally ill and therefore dangerous, the SRP model predicts this will evoke guilt and agitation if detected as being contrary to her desire to be non-prejudiced. Cues for prejudice control are thus formed in order to avoid revisiting the negative, self-punitive feelings following responses discrepant with Implicit Association Experience and Stigma 5 one’s values. Applied to stigma intervention, the SRP model implies that interventions that illuminate one’s implicit biases toward a stigmatized minority group and show how these biases may affect one’s behavior may generate cues for control, reducing explicit stigma. The Brief Implicit Association Test as a Stigma Intervention Recent evidence by Menatti, Smyth, Nosek, and Teachman (under review) suggests this implicit bias education may be achieved through completing a Brief Implicit Association Test (BIAT; Sriram & Greenwald, 2009). In this computer-based measure of implicit biases, one categorizes stimuli, such as “good” and “bad” words, with phrases about the stigmatized group being studied. Response latencies for categorizing the stimuli constitute the measure of strength of automatic associations in memory. Menatti et al. showed that simply taking one of these short tests was associated with less explicitly endorsed stigma. In their first study, participants who completed a BIAT measuring implicit evaluations of mentally ill people before completing an explicit attitude measure about this group reported significantly more positive attitudes than those who completed the tasks in the reverse order. In a follow up study, Menatti et al. examined whether receiving personalized feedback about one’s implicit biases was necessary to elicit the stigma-reduction effect. There was no significant difference in explicitly endorsed stigma between groups who received their personalized BIAT feedback message before completing the stigma questionnaire and those who did not receive their BIAT results. These findings suggest that the experience of taking the BIAT itself, rather than receiving explicit feedback about one’s level of implicit stigma, impacted participants’ later conscious evaluations of mentally ill persons. The researchers hypothesized that the experience of taking the BIAT triggered feelings of “should-would discrepancy” (Devine, Monteith, Zuwerink, & Elliot, 1991). This phenomenon concerns a person’s reflection on what they think they should do Implicit Association Experience and Stigma 6 versus what they would do in a given situation. As the difference between the two grows, negative self-feelings and agitation-related emotions rise. While taking a BIAT, a person may “feel” their implicit biases through finding one category pairing condition more difficult than another, suggesting that the more difficult condition contradicts their automatic associations in memory. For example, if a person felt himself taking longer to correctly sort “good” and “people with mental illness” stimuli together, he might come to understand he more typically associates mentally ill people with negative concepts. This may cause discomfort if he believes himself to be genuinely unbiased. The “should-would discrepancy” resulting from the experience of taking the BIAT is therefore hypothesized to activate the Self-regulation of prejudice process. “Feeling” one’s negative implicit biases could act as a discrepant response from the participant’s ideal nonprejudiced reaction, initiating self-reflection and the development of the cues for control, impeding later biased reactions. Regardless of valence of bias, it is possible that learning about the existence and effects of any implicit biases through the BIAT experience may encourage participants to be more aware of all of their biases and thus curb explicit endorsement of stigma. Mechanisms Underlying the BIAT’s Effect on Stigma The current study intends to evaluate the mechanisms involved in the reduction of explicit bias after taking a BIAT. The study was designed to examine whether the experience of completing an implicit bias assessment, exposure to mental illness content, or both in conjunction are sufficient to induce explicit bias change. If learning about one’s implicit bias initiates self-reflection and cues for prejudice control, it is possible that learning about one’s implicit biases toward any comparable stigmatized minority may successfully create widely generalizable cues for prejudice control. If the effect is more limited, one may need to learn Implicit Association Experience and Stigma 7 about one’s implicit biases toward the target stigmatized group specifically to elicit the effect for that group. The study included four conditions: A mental illness BIAT (exposing participants to both mental illness content and implicit bias assessment); a gay/straight BIAT (exposing participants to implicit bias assessment toward a stigmatized minority group but not to mental illness content); a non-evaluative mental illness pseudo-BIAT (exposing participants to mental illness content but not to implicit bias assessment); and a no intervention control (no exposure to mental illness content or implicit bias assessment), where participants completed the explicit stigma measure before completing a BIAT. The gay/straight BIAT was chosen as an alternative to the mental illness BIAT because people have been shown to generalize empathy from members of one target group to those of another target group categorized under the same superordinate social category (Tarrant & Hadert, 2010). Evidence suggests that the public tends to consider both homosexuality and mental illness as subcategories of the broader “social disability” social category (Albrecht et al., 1982; Crandall, Eshleman, & O’Brien, 2002). We thus hypothesized that any “should-would discrepancy” activated by the gay/straight BIAT would similarly generalize to mentally ill people, a comparable socially stigmatized group, without participants being exposed to mental illness content directly. A non-evaluative pseudo-BIAT was devised to remove the evaluation component from the BIAT task by using neutral circle and rectangle word stimuli instead of good or bad words, then pairing the circle and rectangle stimuli with the mentally ill people phrases. This removal of valence allowed participants to be exposed to the same BIAT task format, but only be primed to mental illness content without exposure to implicit bias assessment. Implicit Association Experience and Stigma 8 Mental illness thought content combined with implicit bias assessment in the mental illness BIAT condition is hypothesized to most directly activate cues for control of prejudice against persons with mental illness, and thus result in the lowest amount of endorsed stigma. Implicit bias assessment of a comparable social minority group (i.e., gay people) in the gay/straight BIAT condition is hypothesized to activate the SRP model as well, but not create as strong cues for prejudice control toward persons with mental illness, resulting in the second lowest endorsed stigma level. Priming of mental illness content alone in the non-evaluative pseudo-BIAT is not thought to necessarily activate the SRP model. However, as increased familiarity with out-groups has been shown to decrease negative evaluations of members of those out-groups (Gonsalkorale, Allen, Sherman & Klauer, 2010; Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006), we believe increased exposure to the mental illness target group through priming should lead to less negative explicit evaluations than the no intervention group, which provides no implicit bias or mental illness concept exposure. Moderators of the BIAT’s Effect on Stigma A second objective of the current study is to explore potential moderators of the BIAT effect, particularly participants’ motivation to control their prejudice. Plant and Devine (1998) describe two empirically distinct motivations to control prejudiced reactions: External and internal motivation. Persons high in external motivation seek to control themselves from making their biases explicit due to concern that an audience might react negatively to their prejudice. Those high in external motivation also tend to report higher levels of self-reported prejudiced attitudes than those who are internally motivated. Those with higher internal motivation have better-defined personal standards against expressing prejudice and judge themselves personally Implicit Association Experience and Stigma 9 for any prejudiced reactions. Persons high in internal motivation also tend to endorse lower levels of prejudice (Crandall et al., 2002; Plant & Devine, 1998). In relation to the should-would discrepancy hypothesized to be at play in the BIAT’s effect on explicit stigma reduction, people high in internal motivation (as opposed to external motivation) report that they should be less prejudiced toward stigmatized minority groups. Those high in internal motivation also tend to react with strong guilt and compunction when they perceive incongruity between their “should” and “would” reactions (Devine et al., 1991). Therefore, for the current study, it was hypothesized that persons high (compared to low) in internal motivation to control prejudice would be more affected by the experience of “feeling” their implicit biases during the implicit bias assessment. This, in turn, should create stronger cues for prejudice control, leading to lower endorsed stigma against persons with mental illness. This study examines two possible components of the BIAT experience that may alter explicit stigma endorsement—experience with an implicit bias measure and mental illness content—and considers how motivation to control prejudice may influence the impact of the BIAT on explicit stigma. As an easy to disseminate and quick intervention, the BIAT has considerable potential to be harnessed as a psychoeducational measure to reduce stigma. Understanding the mechanisms by which taking the BIAT reduces explicit bias and moderators of this effect may enhance our ability to reduce explicit stigma toward people with mental illness. Method Participants Using the Project Implicit web platform for implicit attitudes research (http://implicit.harvard.edu), data were provided from 2597 volunteers, and analyzed from the Implicit Association Experience and Stigma 1