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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

8