Ambiguity Prejudice

In the research article (Salvatore & Shelton, 2007) the effect on cognitive processing by encountering prejudice is being studied. The research that has been done before hand by the authors shows us that even though it is very unlikely that someone would experience obvious prejudice, but many people that belong to minority groups experience prejudice that is implied in different ways that occurs daily. As we know contemporary forms for prejudice are often ambiguous, people that are effected by prejudice may experience cognitive deficiency (Salvatore & Shelton, 2007). There are many theories that state people that are associated with troubled groups have precise strategies for dealing with blatant forms of prejudice. Included in these strategies …show more content…
They expect a lower performance in the Stroop task of black people when exposed to ambiguous prejudice environment rather than a blatant prejudice environment because they will find it difficult to deal with the vagueness of the condition. On the other hand, the authors think that white people will experience lower scores on the Stroop task when faced with blatant prejudice rather than ambiguous because they will have most likely not encountered it before so, they wont know how to deal with it. They likely will not even interpret the ambiguous prejudice since there are no explicit suggestions that there is prejudice present therefore it wont register (cf. Barrett & Swim, …show more content…
In the test, subjects are shown the names of colors in colored letters. The color of the letters does not match the name of the color given. It takes mental effort and concentration to see past the word and just identify the color of the word. The authors used this test to identify how racist decisions affected the results of the test. Thus, the dependent variable was cognitive ability and it was measured by the Stroop test. The participants of this study were required to help and human resources manager decided whether or not to change the way they make hiring decisions. They had to help decide if the human resources officer should make collaborative hiring decisions or solo hiring decisions. They were then given four job candidates and were told to rate then on level of qualification and hireability. After they reviewed that they were given a report of the recommendations of the hiring officer. When they were done looking over the documents the subjects were told to do the Stroop test and then were told about the whole experiment (Salvatore & Shelton,