| Past research has shown that individuals low in prejudice think more carefully when information is from or about stigmatized individuals than non stigmatized individuals. One explanation for this effect is that the heightened scrutiny stems from a motivation to guard against potential prejudice towards stigmatized others (i.e. "watchdog motivation"). The present research tested a variation of the watchdog hypothesis based on the idea of implicit ambivalence. Specifically, we argue that among individuals low in explicit (i.e., deliberative) prejudice, it is those who are also high in implicit (i.e., automatic) prejudice who will do the most processing. The implicit ambivalence framework also makes a novel prediction that individuals who are relatively high in explicit prejudice but low in implicit prejudice would also engage in enhanced information processing. We tested these hypotheses in three studies. As predicted, we found that people with automatic-deliberative discrepancies in racial attitudes engaged in greater processing when the message was about a Black job candidate (study 1), presented by a Black source (Study 2), or even if the African American concept was primed subliminally (study 3), regardless the direction of one's discrepancy. Together, these studies extend previous work examining implicit ambivalence to the domain of racial attitudes, and further clarify the nature of the 'watchdog hypothesis'. |
