ABSTRACT
The results from Ito and Tomelleri (2013) suggest that one avenue for
severing the categorizationstereotyping link is to impose an activation that competes with race information (see also Macrae et al., 1997; Wheeler &
Fiske, 2005), but a question remains: Given the rapidity and automaticity
with which race information is attended, can its initial activation ever be
prevented? The person perception literature argues that attending to the
unique attributes of an individual is qualitatively different from category-
based encoding (Ambady, Bernieri, & Richeson, 2000; Brewer, 1988; Fiske &
Neuberg, 1990). Some more individuating tasks have already been employed
in ERP studies of race perception and failed to prevent racial modulations of
ERPs (Ito & Urland, 2005), but participants in those studies had relatively
impoverished information from which to make their judgements. They were
simply asked to make a personality judgement based on visual appearance.
Behavioural research shows that such zero acquaintance judgements can be
quite accurate (e.g., Dion et al., 1972; Todorov et al., 2005), but it is possible
that attenuating attention to race requires stronger manipulations of
individuation.
