Stereotypes and prejudice in the blood : sucrose drinks reduce prejudice and stereotyping

By M. Gailliot, B. M. Peruche, E. A. Plant, Roy F. Baumeister. 2009

106 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Prejudice and stereotyping cause social problems and intergroup tension. The current work examined whether bolstering self-control by giving participants glucose would reduce stereotype use for an impression formation task. Previous work has demonstrated that self-control depends on biologically expensive brain processes that consume energy derived from glucose in the bloodstream. In the current study, glucose was manipulated via lemonade sweetened with either sugar or Splenda. Compared to the control group, the participants in the glucose condition used fewer stereotypes when writing an essay about a day in the life of a gay man. In addition, high-prejudice participants in the glucose condition used fewer derogatory statements in their essays than high-prejudice participants in the control condition. The findings are discussed in terms of the importance of self-control resources in the effective regulation of prejudice and stereotyping.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Cognitive Neuroscience, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/531aa2181ae9971da1f95457d5262a6d6d7f6896

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Citations in the corpus

Ego depletion and the strength model of self-control: a meta-analysis. (2010, background): “Four studies reporting five separate effect sizes were included in the analysis (DeWall et al., 2008; Gailliot, Baumeister, et al., 2007; Gailliot et al., 2009; Masicampo & Baumeister, 2008).”
The strength model of self-regulation failure and health-related behaviour (2009, background): “Further experiments demonstrated that the ingestion of glucose or sucrose solutions allayed the ego-depletion effect and supports the strength model prediction that the replenishment of self-control resources is important for the recovery of self-control capacity (DeWall, Baumeister, Gailliot, & Man”
Education not Incarceration: A Conceptual Model for Reducing Racial and Ethnic Disproportionality in School Discipline (2014, background): “In addition, time of day, representing onset of hunger or mental fatigue, has been shown in other fields (but not yet tested in education) to increase bias in decisions.(22,41) Extrapolating to educational contexts, there may be more disproportionality in ODRs before lunch or at the end of the schoo”