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2017
gain.”) and 8 presented neutral content (e.g. “A calculator saves time”). In the neutral
condition, all 18 sentences presented neutral content (8 of the sentences were the same
neutral ones as used in the
Meritocracy
condition).
Implicit prejudice
.
An
Affective Priming Task
(Hermans, de Houwer & Eelen, 1994)
was administered before and after the experimental manipulation. In this task, two affectively
polarized stimuli were presented on each trial and participants were asked to judge the
affective connotation of the second stimulus. While the first stimulus (the prime) was
presented only for a short period of time (200 ms), the second stimulus (i.e., the target) was
presented until a response was given. The time needed to categorize the target stimuli as
either “positive” or “negative” was registered. The target (second stimulus) was a positive or
negative word and the prime was either “Moroccans” or neutral (e.g. chair). Each “pair of
target-stimuli” (e.g. Moroccans – Positive Word) appeared five times.
Results
As mentioned in the hypothesis, we were interested in observing the variations in the
expression of negative associations with the target-group. Thus, in this task, we focused on the
level of facilitation of
negative
words by a “Moroccan” prime compared to a neutral prime.
Accordingly, to obtain a score of implicit prejudice, we calculated an index of facilitation of
negative words, which consisted of the response time participants used to categorize a word
as negative after a neutral prime minus the response time participants used to categorize the
same word after the “Moroccans” Prime. This was done separately for Time 1 and Time 2.
Higher scores indicate higher facilitation, which indicates higher implicit prejudice.
We subjected the implicit prejudice scores to an ANOVA with repeated measures using
Time
(of administration of the implicit prejudice measure) as a within-participants factor.
Analyzes revealed a marginally significant interaction that indicates that the variations of
implicit prejudice happened differently between conditions,
F
(1, 34) = 2.90;
p
<. 09. Having
specific hypotheses defined, we conducted single-degree-of-freedom contrasts to test them.
The contrast comparing levels of implicit prejudice at Time 1 and Time 2 in the neutral
condition was non-significant,
B
= -2.6;
F
< 1;
t
(34) = -.064; n.s.. On the contrary, the contrast
for the same comparison in the Meritocracy condition was highly significant,
B
= 91.3;
F
= 5.82;
t
(34) = 2.41;
p
< .02. Thus, only in the Meritocracy condition was there a significant increase of
implicit prejudice towards Moroccans. Additionally, we tested the difference between
conditions at Time 2 and that contrast revealed a marginally significant difference indicating
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