Implicit race attitudes predict trustworthiness judgments and economic trust decisions

By D. Stanley, Peter Sokol-Hessner, Mahzarin R. Banaji, Elizabeth A. Phelps. 2011

247 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Trust lies at the heart of every social interaction. Each day we face decisions in which we must accurately assess another individual's trustworthiness or risk suffering very real consequences. In a global marketplace of increasing heterogeneity with respect to nationality, race, and multiple other social categories, it is of great value to understand how implicitly held attitudes about group membership may support or undermine social trust and thereby implicitly shape the decisions we make. Recent behavioral and neuroimaging work suggests that a common mechanism may underlie the expression of implicit race bias and evaluations of trustworthiness, although no direct evidence of a connection exists. In two behavioral studies, we investigated the relationship between implicit race attitude (as measured by the Implicit Association Test) and social trust. We demonstrate that race disparity in both an individual's explicit evaluations of trustworthiness and, more crucially, his or her economic decisions to trust is predicted by that person's bias in implicit race attitude. Importantly, this relationship is robust and is independent of the individual's bias in explicit race attitude. These data demonstrate that the extent to which an individual invests in and trusts others with different racial backgrounds is related to the magnitude of that individual's implicit race bias. The core dimension of social trust can be shaped, to some degree, by attitudes that reside outside conscious awareness and intention.

Subfields: Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science, Economics & Operations Research

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Citations in the corpus

Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human-like biases (2016, methodology): “The IAT has been used to describe and account for a wide range of implicit prejudices and other phenomena, including stereotype threat (Kiefer and Sekaquaptewa, 2007; Stanley et al., 2011).”
Social attributions from faces: determinants, consequences, accuracy, and functional significance. (2015, unknown): “Recent research also demonstrates that implicit ethnic biases predict evaluations of face trustworthiness (Stanley et al. 2011).”
Brief mindfulness meditation reduces discrimination. (2016, methodology): “The faces were chosen from the sample used in previous research (Stanley et al., 2011), which were selected from several databases, including Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces (Lundqvist, Flykt, & Ohman, 1998), the Eberhardt Laboratory Face Database, the Color Facial Recognition Technology…”