Abstract
Goals in the reduction of automatic prejudice: experiencing the discrepancy. From a social cognition approach, it has been shown that, by default, stereotypes and prejudices are activated in automatic ways. At the same time, there is a trend aimed at discovering the conditions under which automatic influences can be controlled. Within this field, the effectiveness of a strategy for the reduction of automatic prejudice was evaluated in the current study. The intervention was aimed at causing participants to experience a failure when a goal was to be achieved. Different discrepancy theories predict that the perceiver will try to compensate for the failure in this situation. Results obtained from data collected with the Implicit Association Test show that the spontaneous in-group favoritism can be reduced through the use of such a strategy, suggesting that the experience of discrepancies fosters affective compensation. The discussion underlines the contribution of results to theoretical development in the field of automaticity and control.
