Dynamic tuning of evaluations: Implicit racial attitudes are sensitive to incentives for intergroup cooperation

Three experiments tested the hypothesis that implicit preferences for racial ingroup members are reduced when external mechanisms are available to incentivize cooperation between individuals. Study 1 varied the presence (vs. absence) of a third-party punisher in a series of upcoming cross-group trust games. Studies 2 and 3 held the presence of a punisher constant, but varied the punisher's likely effectiveness at incentivizing cooperation by manipulating the punisher's group membership or whether the punisher's presence was common knowledge. The results of S1 and S2 showed that anticipating an effective third party punisher reduced racial bias on an intervening evaluative priming measure. S3 was more equivocal, but overall (and as indexed by a multilevel meta-analysis) the findings across studies provide evidence for situational tuning of rapid evaluative responses as a function of contextually variable cooperative affordances. Copyright © 2017 Guilford Publications Inc.