Lindsay Sharp
Department of Psychology
1202 West Johnson Street
Madison, WI, 53706
Phone: 608-265-3960
Email: lsharp@wisc.edu

Previous research strongly suggests that people possess varying degrees of both internal and external motivations to respond to prejudice. External motivations result from social pressure; an individual is motivated to exhibit low-prejudiced behavior to avoid disapproval from others. Internal motivations relate to personal values, people who possess high internal motivation to respond without prejudice report that they have personal standards dictating egalitarian behavior. Somewhat surprising are recent findings indicate that individuals who possess internal motivation but lack external motivation tend to be more comfortable and successful in interracial interactions and exhibit lower degrees of uncontrollable bias than individuals with large degrees of both types of motivation. Why should one group be more successful in their low-prejudiced endeavors than the other? Perhaps these two types of people differ in the way they perceive others. By definition, egalitarianism entails perceiving others as individuals and not as members of social categories. Using the Who Said What Paradigm in which participants view a discussion and try to remember which person said what statement, we can measure the types of errors that people make and whether they categorize others based on socially informative physical features (i.e., race). It is expected that people possessing high internal motivation to respond without prejudice, but lacking external, perceive others on an individuated basis, as opposed to those who possess high levels of both internal and external motivation, who we expect will attend to social groups and use this information to categorize others.