Professor spends 25 years making ‘prejudice puzzle’

In the 1980s, when equal rights were becoming a cultural norm in America, many psychology researchers encountered people who would respond in interviews that they were not prejudiced, yet their actions would still reflect a bias.

The pessimists in the field would conclude that they simply were lying.

But UW–Madison psychology professor Patricia Devine saw things differently. She trusted people’s initial responses, and that instinct led her on a journey to find out why people want to free themselves of prejudice, yet still act unconsciously with bias.

“I felt like I was this lone voice in the field saying you can trust what people say about their values, but everybody was incredibly suspicious,” says Devine. “There was this clarion call to not trust people’s verbal reports because they are going to lie because it is socially acceptable to be nonprejudiced. I thought that was incredibly cynical.

“It turns out that the work I was doing changed the direction of the field. It caused people to step up and take notice.”

Indeed, Devine is recognized as a national leader in prejudice psychology, with findings that have changed the understanding of how people formulate, express and ultimately overcome bias.

“Extensive amounts of research have demonstrated the prevalence of stereotyping, prejudice and discrimination, but where others saw mere statistics, Trish saw an opportunity,” says Laura Sheets, one of Devine’s students and lab assistants. “The premise upon which much of her research is based is that people desire to be good.”

Devine started her research as a graduate student at Ohio State University, moving to UW–Madison in 1985 to become an associate professor and later a professor. She has spent almost 25 years working to put together what she calls her “prejudice puzzle.”

The first puzzle piece Devine fit was the difference between controlled (conscious) and automatic (unconscious) responses. In the 1980s, when prejudice was the domain of social psychology, Devine used cognitive psychology research on intentional versus unintentional responses to explain why people will respond with controlled non-prejudiced answers when they have time to process questions, but will have automatic biased actions without processing time.

In her studios, individuals first took surveys to show their conscious level of prejudice. Then they took an implicit association test (IAT), a dual categorization task in which participants categorize images or words based on whether they were pleasant. Subjects were asked to press keyboard keys depending on the association.

The assumption underlying the IAT is that the task should be easier when white faces and pleasant words are paired on the same response key and black faces and negative words are paired together than with the reverse pairings, because positive evaluation is associated with white people and negative evaluation with black people.

This measure is an indicator of automatic racial biases on which most white Americans show a bias favoring whites over blacks. Devine explains that these biased automatic responses in IAT tests come from a socialization process that encourages prejudice.

“(Prejudice) is the legacy of our socialization experiences,” she says. “We all learn these stereotypes and have these biases at the ready whether we condone them or not, whether we think they are good or not, and as a result the immediate reaction is a biased one.

“If you are going to respond in nonbiased ways,” she adds, “you have to gain control or override the automatically activated stereotypic response and instead respond in these thoughtful deliberate ways that might represent your personal values.”

Devine says that eliminating prejudice is like breaking a habit. In the same way she had to consciously stop biting her nails as a child, people who want to break the prejudice habit every day have to be aware of their own internal prejudice.

“(Eliminating prejudice) is a process. Making that decision is the first step, but then what you have to do is put some effort into it,” Devine says. “Just making the decision doesn’t mean you wake up one day, stretch, and say ‘I’m not prejudiced,’ because you have got this whole socialization experience that you grew up with.”

It is Devine’s first work in 1989 that differentiated controlled versus automatic responses. It has been cited more than 1,200 times in other research.

“It is almost impossible not to bump into Devine’s research — be it an introductory psychology textbook or in other researchers’ scholarly publications,” says psychology professor and colleague Morton Gernsbacher. “What’s most remarkable is that Devine’s groundbreaking work of the late 1980s and early 1990s has stood the test of time. The findings have been repeatedly replicated, and they have served as a mighty catalyst for further investigation.”

After her first work, Devine continued to develop her prejudice puzzle. She put participants into two groups: high prejudice and low prejudice. The key difference between the two groups is high-prejudice people will respond with prejudice and not have internal conflict, but low prejudice people who respond with prejudice feel guilty afterward.

This guilt, what Devine calls “prejudice with compunction,” is the key to eliminating prejudice.

“When peoples’ values and their automatic biases conflicted, what I predicted is that if they were sincere in their non-prejudicial beliefs, they would feel guilty and self-critical and they would hold themselves accountable,” Devine says. “When given a chance, (low-prejudice) people tried to learn from mistakes, tried to absorb material, and at the next opportunity when prejudice was possible, they responded in a fair and unbiased way.”

By the mid-1990s, Devine’s expertise turned to the campus itself. As UW–Madison began its no-tolerance policy on prejudice, Devine was asked to speak to a class of freshmen during orientation. The professor remembers seeing two reactions from the students in the audience. First, clenched jaws and fists from students who resented having to listen to an anti-prejudice speech. And second, students pulling away from the presentation, fearing they would unintentionally be one of these prejudiced people.

Devine was immediately interested in the second group and wanted to investigate how to better reach this well-intentioned but poorly equipped group of students. She also worried about the first group, fearing that the external pressure to respond without prejudice might exacerbate their prejudice.

Knowing that the current methods weren’t reaching students, Devine began to research student motivation for nonprejudiced behavior and how students could be reached.

Devine found that people have both internal motivations (personal values and standards) and external motivations (pressure from society) to act without bias. Devine has learned people can be internally motivated, externally motivated or both with no correlation between the two.

Her research has also shown that it is only the internal motivations that allow people to act without bias in both controlled and automatic responses. People who are externally motivated or internally and externally motivated respond without prejudice on explicit self-report measures but respond in biased ways on implicit measures that do not allow for control over responses.

Devine’s recent work is changing the ways academics and administration is approaching prejudice education on campus, and is helping to create new solutions to end prejudice permanently.

Devine has won numerous awards from her colleagues at UW–Madison as well as from the American Psychological Association. Devine’s dedication to teaching has also been rewarded by UW–Madison, the UW System and the American Psychological Association.

In addition to teaching both undergraduate and graduate classes, Devine also runs one of the most popular psychology labs in the department. An average of 25 students per semester participate in the lab, many continuing to do prejudice work into graduate school and beyond.

The students Devine is teaching today are the ones who will be the leaders in prejudice research in the future, always fitting new pieces into a complicated puzzle.

“After a year of working as a research assistant in the prejudice lab, I was fortunate to receive Trish’s endless stream of support,” says Sheets. “Through her actions, Trish has taught me how to be a leader.”