Will the "real" American please stand up? The effect of implicit national prototypes on discriminatory behavior and judgments.
Three studies tested whether implicit prototypes about who is authentically American predict discriminatory behavior and judgments against Americans of non-European descent. These studies identified specific contexts in which discrimination is more versus less likely to occur, the underlying mechanism driving it, and moderators of such discrimination. Studies 1 and 2 demonstrated that the more participants held implicit beliefs that the prototypical American is White, the less willing they were to hire qualified Asian Americans in national security jobs; however, this relation did not hold in identical corporate jobs where national security was irrelevant. The implicit belief-behavior link was mediated by doubts about Asian Americans' national loyalty. Study 3 demonstrated a similar effect in a different domain: The more participants harbored race-based national prototypes, the more negatively they evaluated an immigration policy proposed by an Asian American but not a White policy writer. Political conservatism magnified this effect because of greater concerns about the national loyalty of Asian Americans.
Yogeeswaran
Kumar
K
626 Tobin Hall, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003, USA. kumar@psych.umass.edu
Dasgupta
Nilanjana
N
D001213:Asian; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008913:Minority Groups; D010560:Personnel Selection; D011057:Politics; D011287:Prejudice; D012044:Regression Analysis; D012637:Security Measures; D012938:Social Perception; D013240:Stereotyping; D014481:United States; D044465:White People / Q000523:psychology