The Effect of Group Membership and Individuating Information on Automatic and Deliberate Evaluation of Well-Known People

People's automatic (unintentional, uncontrollable, and efficient) preference between social groups often determines their automatic preference between unknown individual members of these groups, a prominent example for automatic prejudice. What happens when the person making the judgment has long known the target individuals? Practice might automatize the deliberate judgment of the individuals. Then, if deliberate judgment is nonprejudiced, automatic prejudice might decrease. In 29 studies (total N = 4,907), we compared preferences between a famous member of a dominant social group and a famous member of a stigmatized social group on indirect measures of evaluation that were developed to measure automatic preference and on self-report measures. In most studies, we chose pairs based on prior self-reported preference for the member of the stigmatized group. The measures showed discrepancy, with indirect measures suggesting an automatic preference for the member of the dominant group. We replicated these results with various target individuals, two pairs of social groups (Black/White, old/young), two indirect measures, and in two countries (Studies 1-23). The indirectly measured prodominant preference was stronger when visual characteristics of the group were present rather than absent (Studies 24 and 25), suggesting a stronger effect of group characteristics on automatic than on deliberate preference between the individuals. On self-report and indirect measures, the preferences between individuals were related to the preferences between their groups (Studies 26 and 27) yet also to individuating information (Studies 28 and 29). Our results suggest that group evaluation plays a central role in the automatic evaluation of familiar (and not only novel) members of stigmatized groups.