The effect of mental depletion on the automatic processes involved in prejudice

Abstract

For the past 40 years, psychological research on stereotypes and prejudice has been dominated by the social cognition perspective, which has emphasized the important role of basic categorization processes. This dissertation investigates the role of ego depletion when using stereotype-based responses in categorization. This research is set to replicate Govorun and Payne’s (2006) study, which concludes that mental depletion affects the automatic processes involved in prejudice. In this study performance on the Weapon Identification Task, was used as a measure of race stereotyping. Prior to performing this task, participants in the experimental group also took part in the depleting Stroop task, the control group completed the Weapon Identification Task only. Participants who took part in the depletion task made more mistakes in the weapon identification task, than those participants who did not take part in the Stroop task. These results support Govorun and Payne’s (2006) findings that ego depletion results in increase stereotyping, however the current research concluded that ego depletion does not only affect the automatic processes involved in prejudice, but rather has an all-around effect.