Stereotypes, Prejudice, and the Taxonomy of the Implicit Social Mind1

How do cognition and affect interact to produce action? Research in intergroup psychology illuminates this question by investigating the relationship between stereotypes and prejudices about social groups. Yet it is now clear that many social attitudes are implicit (roughly, nonconscious or involuntary). This raises the question: how does the distinction between cognition and affect apply to implicit mental states? An influential viewroughly analogous to a Humean theory of actionis that implicit stereotypes and implicit prejudices constitute two separate constructs, reflecting different mental processes and neural systems. On this basis, some have also argued that interventions to reduce discrimination should combat implicit stereotypes and prejudices separately. We propose an alternative (anti-Humean) framework. We argue that all putative implicit stereotypes are affect-laden and all putative implicit prejudices are semantic, that is, they stand in co-activating associations with concepts and beliefs. Implicit biases, therefore, consist in clusters of semantic-affective associations, which differ in degree, rather than kind. This framework captures the psychological structure of implicit bias, promises to improve the power of indirect measures to predict behavior, and points toward the design of more effective interventions to combat discrimination.