This article reports on a psychological experiment to test the effects of racial stereotypes and social desirability bias on clinical judgments. This experiment followed Devine's 1989 study (Devine PG. Stereotypes and prejudice: their automatic and controlled components. Journal of Personality and social Psychology 1989;22:5-18) in which the effects of passive activation of African American stereotypes on social perceptions were evaluated. Devine found that "hostility" was linked categorically to "blacks" and that African American schemas or stereotypes can be activated without the conscious control of the perceiver.

This study enrolled 60 clinicians, half of whom were exposed to a task involving unconscious cognitive priming with words associated with stereotypes about African Americans (the experimental condition), while the other half were exposed to neutral priming words (the control condition). After completing the task, participants read a case summary in which the patient's racial identity was not reported and rated the patient on various dimensions (particularly hostility). The case summary described a patient referred for psychological treatment with a mixed clinical picture that was intended to be diagnostically ambiguous. Finally, the patient's case summary was reintroduced to all participating clinicians, this time with the patient identified as a "black man." The authors hypothesized that the therapists in the experimental group would respond to the rating task with more negative evaluations of the patient on dimensions related to African Americans. Furthermore, therapists would respond to the rating task after becoming aware of the patient's racial identity by giving more positive evaluations to the patients compared with previous evaluations. Finally the authors hypothesized that ratings of clinical features (rather than just simply racial charged descriptors like hostility) would be influenced by exposure to priming. (The dates of data collection are not reported.)

Supporting the first hypothesis, participants exposed to the experimental condition rated the patient more negatively on hostility-related items compared with those exposed to the control condition. Additionally, the hostility-related items were rated more negatively during the first rating, when race was not identified, than during the second rating. However, for the items unrelated to hostility, the control group rated more negatively than the control group. Further, the change in rating after race was identified for the hostility-unrelated items was only obtained in the control group.

The authors explain the unexpected findings in the control group for hostility-unrelated items in that it is possible that the hostility-unrelated items (which were all negative descriptors) might also be racially charged stereotypes (in addition to typically tested stereotype of hostility). Further, the authors suggest that the social desirability bias (or "minimizing bias") might occur only when perceivers acknowledge the possibility that prior perceptions may have been unduly biased in the negative direction.

The last hypothesis proposing that ratings of clinical features would be different for the experimental and control groups was not supported. The authors conclude that this suggests that, even though stereotypes may affect a therapist's general impressions of a black patient with regard to certain attributes, his or her overall diagnostic evaluations are not likely to be affected.