title: Reducing prejudice through priming of control-related words.
abstract: We investigated the effect of incidentally presented constructs that imply self-control on activated stereotypes associated with immigrants. To activate immigrant stereotypes, participants responded to a scale that measures people's prejudice toward immigrants. They were then primed, using scrambled sentences, with words that were related to self-control (e.g., control, restrain, self-regulate) or with neutral words. After the priming task, participants evaluated an ambiguous behavior of a target person. On the basis of three experiments, the results showed that participants primed with the control-related words rated the target behavior more positively than those primed with neutral words. The results are discussed in relation to previous research on self-control, automatic influence of activated constructs, and prejudice reduction.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Uppsala University, Box 1225, SE-751 42 Uppsala, Sweden. Tadesse.Araya@psyk.uu.se
authors.forename: Tadesse
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Araya
authors.forename: Nazar
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Akrami
authors.forename: Bo
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Ekehammar
authors.forename: Lars-Erik
authors.initials: LE
authors.lastname: Hedlund
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D004641:Emigration and Immigration; D005006:Ethnicity / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007389:Internal-External Control; D008297:Male; D010153:Paired-Associate Learning; D011287:Prejudice; D013240:Stereotyping; D013334:Students / Q000523:psychology; D013548:Sweden