Effect of alcohol on race-biased responding: the moderating role of internal and external motivations to respond without prejudice.

OBJECTIVE

This experiment was a systematic examination of how drinking, available response time, and levels of internal and external motivations to respond without prejudice interact to affect responses in a behavioral assessment of the race bias of social drinkers.

METHOD

Ninety-one white undergraduate social drinkers (45 women) were randomly assigned within gender to alcohol (expect alcohol/receive alcohol), placebo (expect alcohol/receive placebo), or simple no-alcohol control (expect no alcohol/receive no alcohol) conditions. Participants then performed a sequential priming task, the Weapons Identification Task, designed to assess race-biased responding, under nonspeeded (2,000 ms) or speeded (500 ms) instructional sets.

RESULTS

Relative to both placebo and simple no-alcohol control groups, participants who consumed alcohol to an average peak breath alcohol concentration of .08 exhibited higher rates of race-biased errors but only under speeded conditions. Further, this effect was moderated by individual differences such that alcohol-induced, race-biased errors were elevated among all participants, except those whose motives to respond without prejudice were primarily internal. Personal motivations to respond without prejudice also moderated the responses of participants in the placebo group, such that those restrained primarily by external concerns uniquely evinced more race-biased errors than participants in the other motive groups.

CONCLUSIONS

Both alcohol intoxication and alcohol expectancy can increase race-biased errors but only under speeded conditions and in a manner moderated by participants' levels of internal and external motives to respond without prejudice.