Mimicry reduces racial prejudice Author Michael Inzlicht, Jennifer Gutsell, Lisa Legault Publication Year 2012 Type Journal Article Abstract Humans are empathic animals. We automatically match other people's motor responses, allowing us to get “under the skin” of other people. Although this perception–action-coupling—a form of motor resonance—occurs spontaneously, this happens less readily with the outgroup (vs. the ingroup) and for those high (vs. low) in prejudice. Thus, prejudice diminishes our tendency to resonate with the outgroup. Here we suggest that the reverse is also possible—that resonating with the actions of an outgroup member can reduce prejudice. We predict, in other words, that explicitly mimicking the outgroup can reduce prejudice. Participants watched a 140-second video depicting actors repeatedly reaching for and drinking from a glass of water. They passively watched a video with Black actors; watched the video and mimicked the Black actors; or watched and mimicked a video with actors from their ingroup. Participants then completed the Affect Misattribution Procedure (Payne, Cheng, Govorun, & Stewart, 2005), a measure of implicit anti-Black prejudice, and an explicit symbolic racism measure. Results indicate that the outgroup-mimicry group had similar implicit preference for Blacks and Whites, unlike the other two groups, which preferred Whites over Blacks. The outgroup-mimicry group also reported less explicit racism towards Blacks than the ingroup-mimicry group, but no less than the ingroup-observation group. Mimicking specific outgroup members, therefore, reduces implicit, and possibly explicit, bias against the outgroup more generally. Keywords mimicry, empathy, implicit bias, social neuroscience Journal Journal of Experimental Social Psychology Volume 48 Pages 361–365 Type of Article Journal Article DOI 10.1016/j.jesp.2011.06.007 Full text The following is an excerpt of the intervention methodology. For more information, please see the full text of the article on the publisher's website or through your institution's library. Participants Sixty-three non-Black undergraduates (37 female, 26 male; Mage = 18.85, SD = 18.85, SD = 2.25) [...] were randomly assigned to one of three between- subject conditions: Outgroup mimicry, outgroup observation, and ingroup mimicry. Procedure Upon entering the lab, participants were randomly assigned to one of the three between-subject conditions that involved watching a 140-second video depicting university-aged male actors sitting at a table with a glass of water and then repeatedly reaching for the glass, taking a small sip of water, and then putting the glass back down [...] In the outgroup-mimicry condition, participants were seated at a table with a glass of water and watched a video of seven different Black actors each performing the action for 20 s. Critically, participants were instructed to match their perception of each actor with their own glass-reaching/water-drinking action. To control for mere observation of the outgroup, in the outgroup-observation condition, participants saw the same video with Black actors, but did not mimic the actors. [...] After watching and (in two conditions) mimicking the actions in the videos, participants completed two measures of anti-Black prejudice, one implicit and one explicit. Measures Affect misattribution paradigm (AMP) We measured implicit anti-Black prejudice with the AMP, which assesses the strength of automatic evaluations of the Black and White racial category [...] Symbolic racism 2000 scale Participants completed the Symbolic Racism Scale—an explicit measure of modern racism, indicative of a subtle form of racism that obscures racist feelings with abstract values, such as justice and order. Type of Prejudice/Bias Race/Ethnicity Country United States Method Lab Setting College/University Google ScholarDOIBibTeX
