Changing one’s prejudiced ways: Awareness, affect, and self-regulation

In this chapter, we review and integrate efforts related to the internal conflict people experience over their often automatic prejudiced tendencies. We first describe the Should-Would Discrepancy questionnaire, which assesses people’s awareness of responding with greater prejudice than their standards prescribe. Results from numerous studies showing awareness of prejudice-related discrepancies and examining validity issues are summarised. Studies examining the affective consequences of discrepant responses are then reviewed. The development and testing of a model concerning the selfregulation of prejudiced responses are described. The model explains how people establish cues for control, which facilitate the inhibition of prejudiced responses. Finally, acknowledging that people sometimes fail to self-regulate their prejudiced responses, we review recent investigations concerning the effects of confrontation by others on the subsequent control of prejudiced responses.