Internal conflict and prejudice-regulation: Emotional ambivalence buffers against defensive responding to implicit bias feedback

Naomi B Rothman; Joseph A Vitriol; Gordon B Moskowitz

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0264535

. 2022 Mar 17;17(3):e0264535. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0264535

Internal conflict and prejudice-regulation: Emotional ambivalence buffers against defensive responding to implicit bias feedback

Naomi B Rothman ^1,^*, Joseph A Vitriol ², Gordon B Moskowitz ³

Editor: Natalie J Shook⁴

PMCID: PMC8929642 PMID: 35298470

Abstract

Becoming aware of bias is essential for prejudice-regulation. However, attempts to make people aware of bias through feedback often elicits defensive reactions that undermine mitigation efforts. In the present article, we introduce state emotional ambivalence—the simultaneous experience of positive and negative emotions “in the present moment”–as a buffer against defensive responding to implicit bias feedback. Two studies (N = 507) demonstrate that implicit bias feedback (vs. no feedback) increases defensiveness (rating the test as less valid, credible, and objective). However, high (vs. low) state emotional ambivalence, which was independent of bias feedback, attenuates this relationship between bias feedback and defensiveness, accounting for a larger share of the variance than negative emotions alone. In turn, this reduced defensiveness among individuals high (vs. low) in emotional ambivalence was associated with increased awareness of bias in the self and others. Results suggest that state emotional ambivalence is associated with increased bias awareness by creating a mindset in which individuals are less defensive to potentially threatening information about their own implicit racial bias. These results have important implications for research on stereotyping and prejudice, emotional ambivalence and psychological conflict, and defensiveness.

Introduction

White Americans are divided on the existence and consequences of racial prejudice, especially its more subtle or unconscious manifestations [1,2]. Many believe that prejudice disadvantages minority groups [3], and are motivated to be egalitarian and fair in their own judgment [4]. However, others disagree and believe that racial prejudice and discrimination are problems of the past [1,5], that society is fair and just [6]), and that efforts to remediate racial disparities and reduce prejudice are misguided and counter-productive [2,7].

Since most people often do not recognize prejudice in society or themselves [8], and even tend to believe they are more objective and less prejudiced than others [9], many scholars and practitioners have proposed that directly demonstrating a person’s bias is an important first step towards increasing awareness of bias in the self. Without such a realization one would be relatively unmotivated to change behavior and engage in prejudice-regulation [10–12]. Unfortunately, confronting people with evidence that they are prejudiced can also incite defensive responding, such as trivializing, derogating, or avoiding the feedback altogether [13–15].

Research suggests that to successfully initiate prejudice regulation in others, bias awareness must be raised, and to do this requires a non-defensive reaction to discussions about bias and feedback about personal biases [16]. Previous research on reducing defensiveness has focused solely on how to mitigate the threat posed by bias feedback through the wording of the feedback [17]. However, aside from shaping the nature of the message, another approach to reducing defensiveness is to focus on preparing the message recipient for potentially threatening information. This is the approach we take through examining the state of emotional ambivalence, experienced in the present moment.

In this article, we integrate previous research on defensive responding and prejudice-regulation with research on ambivalence and psychological conflict to propose that the state of emotional ambivalence, the simultaneous experience of positive and negative emotions in the present moment, can make people less defensive to feedback about implicit racial bias. We theorize that emotional ambivalence plays this mitigating role by making people more cognitively flexible and thus less defensive in their processing of the feedback. For people high in emotional ambivalence, this attenuated defensiveness, in turn, makes them more aware of bias in the self and others.

Differences between attitudinal ambivalence and emotional ambivalence

Emotional ambivalence can be differentiated from traditional approaches to studying attitude ambivalence. Traditional approaches to the study of attitude ambivalence build on the dissonance literature. Dissonance is caused by a threatening consistency violation (e.g., threat to the integrity of the self-system [18]),—usually the result of behavioral or attitudinal commitment to a cognition that is in direct conflict with a pre-existing attitude. The threat is greatest when a self-relevant attitude or belief is challenged by an inconsistent (dissonant) action, belief, or attitude. For instance, dissonance may be triggered when a self-relevant attitude is directly challenged by some new information, such as bias feedback. The conflict creates threat, and people become motivated to remove the threat in a variety of ways, with defensiveness being one predominant strategy. Similarly, traditional approaches to the study of attitude ambivalence assume that ambivalence is a threatening consistency violation, is usually experienced as unpleasant, and motivates desires to reduce the ambivalence or the negative affect it produces in a variety of ways.

However, not all attitude ambivalence is experienced as threat. There is evidence that attitude ambivalence does not always produce negative affect or threat. Attitudinal ambivalence, for instance, can be desirable when an issue is controversial [19], is sometimes negatively related to physiological arousal [20], and is even cultivated by people in the face of uncertainty that they can obtain a desirable outcome [21]. In fact, ambivalent attitude holders are thought to only experience more arousal than individuals with univalent attitudes when they need to commit to one side of the attitude object [22].

This perspective is consistent with how we conceptualize the state experience of emotional ambivalence. As we define it, the state experience of emotional ambivalence–an experience of positive and negative emotions “in the present moment”–is non-threatening because it is not about a specific triggering event (e.g., feedback about the self), nor is it a response to it. In short, it is not a reaction against a threat to the integrity of the self-system, which one must defend. It is simply the existence of positive and negative emotions at the same time, in the present moment. Further, emotional ambivalence is expected to be non-threatening in our research because people do not have to make an unequivocal stance and can remain noncommittal (there is no behavioral commitment). In our paradigm, therefore, emotional ambivalence is not expected to be self-threatening for these reasons [23] and is thus not expected to produce defensiveness.

Rather, our expectation is that when this non-threatening state experience of emotional ambivalence is high, it leads to reduced defensiveness in cognitive processing about bias feedback. We draw on response amplification theory [24,25] which suggests that people who are ambivalent are more influenced by the context than people who are not ambivalent. For instance, research has demonstrated that compared to their unambivalent counterparts, ambivalent attitude holders are prone to exhibiting more extreme responses–behavioral intentions—to a stigmatized individual in the direction of the positive or negative information provided about that individual. In contrast, these situational cues do not impact unambivalent participants who are less open to considering information from sources other than their prior attitudes [25]. By extension, we predict that emotional ambivalence will also make people more influenced by contextual cues–that is, less defensive to information provided by the experimenter. In our research, that information is feedback about their implicit race bias.

Some suggestive evidence for this prediction comes from research showing that individuals who are high in attitude ambivalence are more open to persuasion. For example, they can be persuaded by individuals from both their own university and another university, whereas low ambivalent individuals are less open to persuasion, only demonstrating attitude change when the source of the message is the student at their own university [26]. Our work aims to advance this scholarship by demonstrating that the state experience of emotional ambivalence can make people less defensive and more influenced by feedback from others, even when that feedback is potentially self-threatening.

A more flexible and broader processing style

Evidence from across numerous different literatures studying internal conflict suggest a reason why emotional ambivalence should make people less defensive and more influenced by even negative information about the self [27,28]. Internal conflicts that are not threatening, such as emotional ambivalence [29], mind-body dissonance [30], nonconscious goal conflicts [31], and metaphorical conflict [32] occur when contradictory alternatives are simultaneously present. This research has shown that creating internal conflict activates a broader general reasoning process that, once accessible, can be applied to subsequent judgments [29,32]. Presuming the internal conflict is not a threat.

Specifically, internal conflict broadens general reasoning by increasing the individuals’ scope of attention, and also motivates a balanced consideration of multiple different perspectives. For instance, non-conscious goal conflicts increase a broader and more balanced consideration of relevant information before making choices; specifically, participants who experienced non-conscious goal conflict searched for more information by electing to see a larger number of boxes on an information display board [33] and also sought and considered both confirmatory and disconfirmatory information in a trait hypothesis testing task [31]. Further, emotional conflict increases motivation to consider both positive and negative information about others before making decisions; specifically, participants who experienced emotional ambivalence in the present moment were motivated to consider both positive and negative feedback about a potential job candidate, in comparison to happy participants who were more motivated to seek positive than negative feedback [29]. In another study, participants who experienced incidental emotional ambivalence through a recall exercise were more likely to seek, weigh, and incorporate alternative perspectives—measured by others’ advice—while making numerical estimations, relative to participants who experienced happiness or sadness through a recall exercise [29]. As a result, it has been suggested that emotional ambivalence increases cognitive flexibility [28].

Sassenberg et al. [34] provide a review of research on the flexibility mindset, which is defined as an “activated cognitive strategy that leads to more divergent thinking, the use of broad cognitive categories, and the switching between categories” (p. 3). Such a mindset is triggered by situations that call for creativity and where internal conflict is present. As others before [28], they discuss emotional ambivalence as one type of conflict that should trigger this divergent, flexible and broad style of processing that creates greater possibilities for both persuasion and self-regulation. In the present research, we build on this prior work [28] and theorize that emotional ambivalence creates a cognitively flexible mind-set that broadens the scope of attention and will motivate individuals to engage in a balanced consideration of different perspectives. We predict that this cognitively flexible mindset will extend to information about the existence of one’s own implicit racial bias. This will render emotionally ambivalent individuals less defensive to self-relevant and potentially self-threatening information, attenuating defensive responses to personal implicit bias feedback.

The relationship of emotional ambivalence and prejudice regulation

Cognitive flexibility is central to the broader processing observed in research on creativity [35–37], persuasion [38], deliberation among alternative goal pursuits [39], and most importantly for the current purpose, stereotype change [40]. As a result, there is reason to believe emotional ambivalence should be important for not only attenuating defensive responses to bias feedback, but, in turn, to increasing bias awareness.

Prejudice regulation, specifically a decrease in the experience and expression of prejudice, requires people to be motivated to alter their responding. To do so often first requires awareness that responding is biased and in need of alteration. This is interfered by defensive processing during discussions about bias [8,17,41]. Many people respond defensively to implicit bias feedback [8,15,14].

But, we propose that reduced defensiveness to bias feedback from increased emotional ambivalence will, in turn, increase concern about and awareness of one’s implicit racial bias. Because people who are high in bias awareness are attuned to the possibility that they exhibit subtle biases [8], this awareness should be higher among individuals who are less (vs. more) defensive. Thus, we expected a conditional indirect effect of implicit bias feedback (vs. no feedback) on bias awareness through reduced defensive responding, with individuals high (vs. low) in emotional ambivalence showing reduced defensive responding and, in turn, increased bias awareness. Examining reactions to implicit racial bias feedback is a fruitful domain for testing whether emotional ambivalence reduces defensiveness to threatening information about the self, and thus greater awareness of bias. To our knowledge, emotional ambivalence has not been examined in the prejudice-regulation domain.

Current research

Overview and design

Across two independent samples, we investigate the hypothesis that the effect of implicit bias feedback (vs. no feedback) on defensive responding will be reduced among individuals who are high (vs. low) in emotional ambivalence (Hypothesis 1). We also examine whether defensive responding will mediate the relationship between the interaction between bias feedback and emotional ambivalence on bias awareness. We expect that, among people high (vs. low) in emotional ambivalence, implicit bias feedback (vs. no feedback) will indirectly covary with increased bias awareness through reduced defensive responding (Hypothesis 2).

We test these hypotheses using a meta-analysis of observations from two independent samples. Both samples employed a single independent variable design (Implicit Racial Bias Feedback vs. No Feedback). In Sample 1, an additional experimental condition was run concomitantly, but was designed to test hypotheses different from what is addressed here. Information about this condition is available in the Supplemental Materials. Additional measures were assessed in Sample 2 for research questions not addressed in the current study. These are also available in the Supplemental Materials. Below, we describe the characteristics of each sample separately. We then present meta-analytic estimates across the two samples for tests of our hypotheses. The Supplemental Materials provide a complete description of all of the measures, analyses, and results for each sample, separately, including measures not included in the current analyses. All other measures, manipulations, and exclusions are fully reported.

Materials and methods

Participants

The University of Minnesota Institutional Review Board indicated approval of this research via written consent. Participants for both samples were recruited from Amazon MTurk. Although these samples are not a representative, random sample of the American public, Mturk samples are older and more diverse than typical samples of university students, and more nationally representative than typical internet samples [42]. By utilizing Mturk, we were able to obtain a large, non-random sample of White Americans with sufficient variability on demographic characteristics and, more importantly, the constructs of interest (see [43], on the usefulness of Mturk for psychological research).

Sample 1 included 268 U.S. citizens (64.93% females, 35.07% males; age M = 36.19, SD = 12.23; 44.78% report a family income greater than 50K and 46.27% have earned at least a Bachelor’s degree). As planned, 30 non-White participants were excluded from analyses, as our focus is primarily on White Americans, leaving us with a final sample of 238 White U.S. Citizens. With the current sample size, to observe an interaction between feedback condition and emotional ambivalence, we estimated that we had 34% power to detect a Cohen’s d of 0.2 and 97% power to detect a Cohen’s d of 0.5, and 99% power to detect Cohen’s d larger than .5.

Sample 2 included 317 U.S. citizens (59.9% females, 40.10% males; age M = 37.40, SD = 13.11; 49.10% report a family income greater than 50K and 54.7% have earned at least a Bachelor’s degree). As planned, 48 non-White participants were excluded from analyses, as our focus is primarily on White Americans, leaving us with a final sample of 269 White U.S. Citizens. With the current sample size, to observe an interaction between feedback condition and emotional ambivalence, we estimated that we had 37% power to detect a Cohen’s d of 0.2 and 98% power to detect a Cohen’s d of 0.5, and 99% power to detect Cohen’s d larger than .5.

Procedure

Participants were recruited for a study of “Attitudes About People”. The study advertised that it was primarily looking to recruit White U.S. citizens. The name of the study is intended to increase the expectation that one’s beliefs and attitudes about other people would be directly measured.

Participants first viewed a consent form for the study, and were then randomly assigned to the bias feedback or no feedback (i.e., control) condition. Participants then proceeded to complete an IAT that they were told would measure “unconscious racial attitudes”. The test presented them with pictures of men they needed to categorize according to race, and words they needed to categorize as good or bad, with accuracy and speed supposedly being measured for the purpose of yielding a “bias score” that would later be reported to them [44]. This test was not actually used to provide the feedback, as it was merely a cover story to provide participants with a basis for feedback that was, in reality, randomly manipulated. That is, this test was used as a false-feedback paradigm [17,45], in which participants were randomly assigned to receive bias feedback (vs. no feedback). The actual validity of the IAT as a measure is irrelevant to our purpose.

Our main objectives were to measure defensive reactions following exposure to the bias feedback. In these studies, the bias feedback is always a deception by experimental design–the feedback is not accurate and our goal is to have participants believe it is accurate, in order to impactfully distribute feedback about bias. The validity of utilizing the IAT as a paradigm for manipulating beliefs about personal attitudes was first demonstrated by Vitriol et al.5 and has since been used in research studying reactions to implicit bias feedback [17]. Participants complete the IAT, and receive false feedback about their performance (though we use their actual scores as control variables). The language and stimuli used for the feedback is available in the Supplemental Materials.

After receiving bias feedback, all participants complete measures of affect, defensive responding, and bias awareness. All of these measures are described below. Finally, participants completed measures of demographics and were fully debriefed.

Measures

Means (SD), alphas, and intercorrelations of all measures are available in Table 1. The exact language used in the instructions, question stems, and items for each experiment, are available in the Supplemental Materials. All continuous variables were rescaled to run from 0–1 for easier comparison and estimation of effect sizes.

Table 1. Mean, SD, and correlations between all continuous variables used.

Variables	M	SD	1	2	3	4
1. Race IAT D-Scores	.63	.07	--
2. Emotional Ambivalence	.31	.19	.04	--
3. Defensive Responding	.59	.28	-.03	-.12^**	--
4. Bias Awareness	.48	.18	.00	.37^**	-.45 ^**	--

Open in a new tab

Note.

†p < .10

*p < .05

**p < .01.

Implicit attitudes

The IAT consists of two critical blocks: in one block the labels “White People” and “Good” share the same response key, and “Black People” and “Bad” share another response key. A trial involves a stimulus appearing at the center of the screen, which corresponds to one of the four labels, and the correct response key must be made before moving onto the next trial. In the other critical block, the instruction is reversed and the labels “White People” and “Bad” share the same response key and “Black people” and “Good” share the same response key. If participants have faster reaction times to the first block relative to the second block, this indicates a pro-White/anti-Black. The magnitude of this difference is reflected in a participant’s D-score (see [46]).

Affect

Following the procedure described by prior research on prejudice-regulation [47], participants reported the extent to which affect adjectives characterized their emotional state (1 = does not apply at all, 7 = applies very much). Six items were used to measure positive affect (e.g., “optimistic”; Sample 1 Cronbach’s alpha = .92, Sample 2 Cronbach’s alpha = .94) and 7 items were used to measure negative affect (e.g., “guilty”; Sample 1 Cronbach’s alpha = .95, Sample 2 Cronbach’s alpha = .95). Specifically, participants reported to what extent each statement was representative of them in the present moment. To assess ambivalence, we calculated an ambivalence score to reflect the balance between positive and negative affect [48], assessing both similarity and extremity in the coexisting positive and negative components. For instance, an individual who reports the strongest positive and negative feelings would be considered highly ambivalent, whereas an individual with high positive and low negative (or vice versa) feelings would have low ambivalence. The Griffins formula, is one of the most commonly used calculations of ambivalence in the literature, is ((P + N)/2 - |P–N|), where P = positive and N = negative emotions. Higher values represent higher levels of emotional ambivalence.

Defensive responding

Following the procedure used in other research examining reactions to implicit bias feedback [17], participants reported their belief in the validity, credibility, and objectivity of the IAT across 4 items using a 7-point scale (1 = Not at all, 7 = Extremely”). These items include 1) “In your opinion, how credible is this test?”, 2) “In your opinion, how objective is this test?”, 3) “In your opinion, how valid are the results of this test?, 4) “In your opinion, how useful is this test for understanding people’s racial attitudes?” These items were reverse-coded, such that higher values represent lower perceptions of the credibility and validity of IAT, and thus higher levels of defensiveness (Sample 1 Cronbach’s alpha = .90, Sample 2 Cronbach’s alpha = .94).

Bias awareness

Participants reported the extent to which they perceive themselves as biased. 13-items measured participants’ recognition of their own implicit racial bias and its social consequence. On a 7-point scale, participants responded to such items as, “How likely is it that your unconscious beliefs are unfavorable toward racial minorities?”, “Do you believe that your unconscious racial attitudes influence your behavior towards racial minorities in an unfair way?”, and “How likely is it that unconscious racial attitudes biases people’s judgments and behavior towards racial minorities?” Higher values represent increased bias awareness (Sample 1 Cronbach’s alpha = .89, Sample 2 Cronbach’s alpha = .90).

Demographics

Participants reported their age, gender, race, family income, and level of education.

Results

The data and data syntax for the analysis reported below are available at: https://osf.io/yre38/?view_only=e6ec0f6759a44bc9ab6c982eaacacf99.

To test our first hypothesis, we first conducted a meta-analysis across the two samples, in which we estimated a multilevel model with maximum likelihood estimation and sample submitted as a random-intercept term. A dummy-coded variable was created to represent condition assignment, with the bias feedback condition coded as “1” and the no feedback treated as the reference group (coded as “0). Interaction terms were constructed between emotional ambivalence and this dummy-coded variable. Simple slope analyses for significant interactions were computed at one standard deviation above and below the mean of the moderator, following the procedures recommended by Aiken and West [49].

The results of the random-intercept model support Hypothesis 1. We obtained a significant interaction between bias feedback (vs. no feedback) and emotional ambivalence (Z = -3.26, b = -.38, SE = .12, (95% CI = -.61, -.15), p = .001). Bias feedback (vs. no feedback) was found to increase defensive responding among individuals 1 SD below the mean of emotional ambivalence (Z = 6.21, b = .39, SE = .06, (95% CI = .27, .51), p < .001), but this effect was attenuated at 1 SD above the mean of ambivalence (Z = 9.28, b = .25, SE = .03, (95% CI = .19, .30), p < .001). Given that all original variables were rescaled to run from 0–1, substantively these estimates indicate that for participants with low levels of emotional ambivalence, bias feedback (vs. no feedback) led to approximately a 39% increase in defensive responding; for participants with relatively high levels of emotional ambivalence, bias feedback (vs. no feedback) led to approximately a 25% increase in defensive responding. The effects of feedback condition on defensive responding as a function of emotional ambivalence is provided in Fig 1, separately for each sample and for the meta-analytic estimate. These results are robust to the inclusion of Race IAT D-scores and univariate affect (positive and negative) as control variables, suggesting that the interaction between emotional ambivalence and feedback remain significant when accounting for univalent positive and negative emotion. No significant main effect of feedback condition on emotional ambivalence was observed.

Fig 1 — (A) Study 1: The effect of feedback condition on defensive responding as a function of emotional ambivalence (B) Study 2: The effect of feedback condition on defensive responding as a function of emotional ambivalence (C) Meta-Analytic Analysis: The effect of feedback condition on defensive responding as a function of emotional ambivalence.

We also conducted an analysis in which we estimated the simultaneous effect of three interaction terms—feedback condition and positive emotion, negative emotion, or ambivalent emotion—on defensive responding, again using a multilevel model with maximum likelihood estimation and sample submitted as a random-intercept term. Doing so renders all interaction terms statistically non-significant (ps > .05), which is to be expected, given that ambivalence is computed using positive and negative emotion. Nonetheless, we estimated two models in which we regressed defensive responding on positive, negative, and ambivalent emotion, separately for participants in the Bias Feedback and No Feedback condition. Again, we used multilevel models with maximum likelihood estimation and sample submitted as a random-intercept term. For participants in the No Feedback condition, positive emotion significantly predicted defensive responding (b = -.27, SE = .07, (95% CI = -.41, -.13), p < .001), but neither negative emotion (b = -.05, SE = .12, (95% CI = -.29, .19), p = .69) nor ambivalent emotion (b = -.08, SE = .14, (95% CI = -.35, .19), p = .54) was a significant predictor. In contrast, for participants in the Bias Feedback condition, positive emotion did not significantly predict defensive responding (b = -.10, SE = .06, (95% CI = -.22, .01), p = .08). However, both negative emotion (b = -.20, SE = .08, (95% CI = -.35, -.04), p = .013) and ambivalent emotion (b = -.24, SE = .10, (95% CI = -.44, -.04), p = .02) were significant predictors.

More importantly, because all variables were rescaled to run 0–1, we are able to compare the strength of the relationship between defensive responding and negative or ambivalent emotion in the Bias Feedback condition. Inspection of the unstandardized coefficients indicates that moving from the lowest to the highest levels of negative emotion corresponded with approximately 20% reduction in defensive responding (while controlling for ambivalent emotion and positive emotion), whereas moving from the lowest to the highest levels of ambivalence corresponded with approximately 24% reduction in defensive responding (while controlling for negative and positive emotion). Thus, negative emotion and ambivalence both reduced defensive responding independent of each other, with the latter accounting for a larger share of the variance in the dependent variables than the former. We return to a discussion of the relative effects of negative emotion and emotional ambivalence in the general discussion section.

Next, to test our second hypothesis, SEM was performed with STATA 14.2, using maximum likelihood parameter estimation, in which defensive responding is modeled as a mediator for the effects of (a) the interaction between implicit bias feedback (coded as “1”; vs. no feedback, coded as “0”) and emotional ambivalence on (b) bias awareness. In order to account for clustering of responses within experiments in this mediation analysis, the indirect effect was computed based on the product-of-coefficient approach, using the multilevel mediation analysis command available in STATA that was adapted from Krull and MacKinnon [50]. Subsequently, a bootstrap analysis was performed following the recommendation by Preacher and Hayes [51] with 5000 resampled data sets. Bootstrapping estimates the indirect effect on each resampled data set based on the null hypothesis that the indirect effect is not different from zero. For all analyses below, we reject the null hypothesis if the confidence interval does not include zero [51].

Fig 2 represents the theoretical models and Table 2 summarizes the direct and indirect effects for the hypothesized models. Consistent with our hypothesis, results indicate that the interaction between bias feedback (vs. no feedback) and emotional ambivalence covaried indirectly with bias awareness through its relationship to defensive responding. Conditional indirect effects of implicit bias feedback (vs. no feedback) on awareness were estimated at the 1 SD Above/Below the mean of emotional ambivalence. Results indicate that individuals who experienced high (vs. low) levels of emotional ambivalence responded less defensively to implicit bias feedback, and this, in turn, led to relatively more awareness of bias in the self and others.

Table 2. Results from SEM for bias awareness.

	b (95% CI)				β
Model	FB	AMB	X	DEF	FB	AMB	X	DEF	SE				R²
Direct									FB	AMB	X	DEF
Bias Aware Defensiveness	.12 (.12, .12)^* .32 (.30, .34)*	.41 (.41, .41)^*** .01 (-.12, .13)	-.23 (-.27, .20)^* -.38 (-.43, -.33)*	-.32 (-.32, -.32)^***	.33^* .58^*	.43^* .01 ^*	-.27^* -.29^*	-.48^***	.01 .002	.002 .06	.02 .02	.001	.33 .16
Indirect
Bias Aware	-.10 (-.11, -.09)^***	-.002 (-.04, .04)	.12 (.10, .14)^***		-.28^***	-.002	.14^***		.00	.02	.01
Total
Bias Aware	.02 (.01, .03)^***	.41 (.37, .45)^***	-.11 (-.14, -.09)^**		.05^***	.43^***	-.13^***		.01	.02	.01
Simple	FB 1 SD +		FB 1 SD -						FB 1 SD +		FB 1 SD -
Bias Aware	-.04 (-.06, -.02)^***		-.09 (-.12, -.06)^***						.01		.02

Open in a new tab

FB = implicit bias feedback; AMB = emotional ambivalence; X = interaction term between feedback and ambivalence; DEF or Defensiveness = defensive responding; Bias Aware = bias awareness.

FB 1 SD +/- = Effect of feedback 1 SD above/below mean of ambivalence.

SE represent standard error for unstandardized coefficients.

(†p<0.10

*p<0.05

**p<0.01

***p<0.001).

General discussion

Two studies demonstrate that non-threatening internal conflict–state emotional ambivalence “in the current moment”—attenuates defensiveness to implicit bias feedback. Further, among people high (vs. low) in emotional ambivalence, implicit bias feedback (vs. no feedback) indirectly increases bias awareness through reduced defensive responding. Individuals who experienced high (vs. low) levels of emotional ambivalence following receipt of implicit bias feedback perceived the bias feedback as more valid, credible, and objective, regardless of the extent to which they held implicitly or explicitly prejudicial attitudes. These results may suggest that emotional ambivalence increases bias awareness by creating a mindset in which individual’s scope of attention is broadened and their willingness to be influenced by contextual information in increased. As a result, this flexible mindset reduces defensive responding to potentially threatening information, in this case, feedback about the existence of their own unconscious racial bias.

The integrative nature of the present research contributes to several areas of psychological inquiry. First, we build on research on attitude ambivalence, internal conflict, and emotional ambivalence, and integrate it with research on defensive responding and prejudice-regulation to demonstrate for the first time that emotional ambivalence is an internal state by which individuals may become more influenced by contextual information, and thus less defensive to potentially self-threatening implicit bias feedback. The current research also helps to advance a growing body of research on the effects of emotional ambivalence on information processing. Considering the evidence that emotional ambivalence can make people more receptive to negative information about others when developing perceptions [41], an open and important question was whether it can also make individuals less defensive to negative information about the self. Our findings suggest that it does.

Second, that negative affect was also associated with reduced defensive responding following bias feedback is consistent with a large literature demonstrating the role of guilt and negative affect in the self-regulation of prejudiced-responding [10,41,52,53]. Specifically, prior work has shown that self-directed negative affect (i.e., guilt) is particularly beneficial for increasing prejudice-regulation among low prejudiced individuals’ whereas other-directed negative affect (i.e., the desire to avoid general discomfort and social admonishment) decreases prejudicial responding among individuals high in prejudice [41,54,55]. This research has yet to explore whether complex emotions such as emotional ambivalence could motivate reduced defensiveness to bias feedback.

We have shown that negative affect and state experiences of emotional ambivalence both reduce defensive responding independent of each other, with the latter accounting for a larger share of the variance in the dependent variables than the former. Importantly, by studying the state experience of emotional ambivalence we are offering a different route for attenuating defensive responses than has been offered in this prior scholarship. Emotional ambivalence is expected to have such an effect through a different mechanism than guilt. Guilt has been studied in terms of goal pursuit. When people do not reach their egalitarian standards, they feel guilty. Guilt then makes people motivated to reach their standards–to be egalitarian—and one way to do this is to seek goal relevant information and become less defensive to bias feedback and more aware of bias. But, the goal of being egalitarian (induced by guilt) could also be achieved by rejecting the feedback and rejecting evidence of one’s bias, hence declaring oneself egalitarian and the feedback wrong. Which of these effects of guilt is found may depend on individual differences. In contrast, we predicted that emotional ambivalence will make people more willing to be influenced by contextual cues and more cognitively flexible. As such, they will become less defensive to influence from expert’s knowledge and feedback. Emotional ambivalence does not focus individuals on a particular type of goal or cognition but rather will increase their willingness to be influenced by all available information. By moving beyond the exclusive focus on univalent integral negative affect (e.g., guilt, discomfort) to emotional ambivalence, our research expands the modal conceptualization of internal conflict in the prejudice-regulation literature. As a result, we provide additional nuance about how affect shapes bias awareness.

Further, whereas prior research has established the importance of integral negative emotions, or emotions triggered by the current situation, for prejudice-regulation [41] our research is the first to establish the importance of incidental emotions. Our research is also the first to demonstrate incidental emotional ambivalence as a factor by which high and low prejudiced individuals may become less defensive to threatening bias feedback.

Further, based on prior scholarship, we create dissonance (not ambivalence) in White individuals through delivering bias feedback [17]. This recent scholarship has led to a research interest in how to mitigate the threat of bias feedback so that people can learn from it. This can be done in one of two general and independent ways–by shaping the feedback to be less threatening or by altering the state of the individual to be more receptive to feedback. Some scholarship has focused on that first factor, that is, how to deliver this type of feedback to mitigate the threat [16,17]. Our focus is on the second factor, how internal individual states–emotional ambivalence—can help to prepare people to receive this threatening bias feedback. In doing so, our research advances an emerging literature on defensive responding to implicit bias feedback that has focused on individual differences in accurate awareness of implicit attitudes [8], implicit-explicit incongruence [14], or perception of one’s bias relative to others [12]. We are the first to demonstrate that a state experience of emotional internal conflict that is caused by incidental events can increase bias awareness by reducing defensiveness to implicit bias feedback.

Limitations

The limitations of our current research offer opportunities for future scholarship. First, our theoretical and practical interests concerned how members of high-status social groups (e.g., White people) respond to socially undesirable feedback about their implicit bias towards members of low-status, marginalized social groups (i.e., Black people). As such, we focused our empirical tests on White people only. However, the question of how emotional ambivalence may attenuate defensive responses among non-White people is a necessary direction for future research. Indeed, there are compelling reasons to anticipate that the way in which people respond to feedback indicating bias towards one’s own social group (i.e., Black participants learning about implicit bias towards Black people) is a different phenomenon than how people respond to feedback indicating bias towards an out-group (i.e., White participants learning about implicit bias towards Black people).

Additionally, we have suggested that our effects operate through a mechanism that is based on ambivalence amplification theory [22,26] and prior research on internal conflict [23,24]. Response amplification suggests that people who are ambivalent are more influenced by the context than people who are not ambivalent. Research on internal conflicts has shown that creating internal conflict activates a broader general reasoning process that, once accessible, can be applied to subsequent judgments [24,41]. Taken together, this scholarship suggests that the state experience of emotional ambivalence, measured after taking the IAT and receiving feedback (although not manipulated by these activities), should motivate individuals to be more willing to be influenced by others and create a general reasoning process that broadens the scope of information one is willing to consider in new, non-threatening domains. In the current research, we demonstrate the effects of this emotional state on reduced defensiveness. However, future research should extend these observations by measuring the state of emotional ambivalence before these manipulations, or manipulating emotional ambivalence about an unrelated incidental experience [see 41] and measuring cognitive flexibility directly to uncover the psychological mechanism we have theorized.

Future research should also explore the role of emotional ambivalence not only for reducing defensiveness and increasing awareness but also for actual prejudice-regulation and behavior in interracial settings, which we know can be undermined when people respond defensively [12–14,17]. In addition, while the moderating effect of emotional ambivalence on defensive responding was observed in response to feedback that characterized unconscious racial bias in a particularly unflattering manner, future research could examine these effects using less extreme feedback manipulations, such as in interpersonal confrontations (see [10]) or as they operate in relation to other forms of unconscious bias (e.g., gender bias).

These findings point to a simple and promising tool for overcoming defensiveness to self-threatening feedback. The state experience of emotional ambivalence offers an opportunity for reduced defensiveness about prejudice and bias.

Supporting information

S1 File

(DOCX)

Click here for additional data file.^{(224.2KB, docx)}

Data Availability

All relevant data files are available from the OSF database (https://osf.io/yre38/?view_only=e6ec0f6759a44bc9ab6c982eaacacf99).

Funding Statement

The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.

References

1.Bobo L., Kluegel J. R., & Smith R. A. (1997). Laissez-faire racism: The crystallization of a kinder, gentler, antiblack ideology. Racial attitudes in the 1990s: Continuity and change, 15, 23–5. [Google Scholar]
2.Norton M. I., & Sommers S. R. (2011). Whites see racism as a zero-sum game that they are now losing. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6, 215–218. doi: 10.1177/1745691611406922 [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
3.Crandall C. S., Eshleman A., & O’Brien L. (2002). Social norms and the expression and suppression of prejudice: the struggle for internalization. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82, 359–378. [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
4.Dunton B. C., & Fazio R. H. (1997). An individual difference measure of motivation to control prejudiced reactions. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 23, 316–326. [Google Scholar]
5.Sears D. O., & Henry P. J. (2003). The origins of symbolic racism. Journal of personality and social psychology, 85, 259–275. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.85.2.259 [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
6.Jost J. T., Banaji M. R., & Nosek B. A. (2004). A decade of system justification theory: Accumulated evidence of conscious and unconscious bolstering of the status quo. Political psychology, 25, 881–919. [Google Scholar]
7.Huddy L., & Feldman S. (2009). On assessing the political effects of racial prejudice. Annual Review of Political Science, 12, 423–447. [Google Scholar]
8.Perry S. P., Murphy M. C., & Dovidio J. F. (2015). Modern prejudice: Subtle, but unconscious? The role of Bias Awareness in Whites’ perceptions of personal and others’ biases. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 61, 64–78. [Google Scholar]
9.Pronin E., Lin D. Y., & Ross L. (2002). The bias blind spot: Perceptions of bias in self versus others. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28, 369–381. [Google Scholar]
10.Czopp A.M, Monteith M., & Mark A.Y. (2006). Standing up for change. Reducing bias through interpersonal confrontation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90, 784–803. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.90.5.784 [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
11.Hillard A. L., Ryan C. S., & Gervais S. J. (2013). Reactions to the implicit association test as an educational tool: A mixed methods study. Social Psychology of Education, 16, 495–516. [Google Scholar]
12.Howell J. L., & Ratliff K. A. (2017). Not your average bigot: The better‐than‐average effect and defensive responding to Implicit Association Test feedback. British Journal of Social Psychology, 56, 125–145. doi: 10.1111/bjso.12168 [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
13.Howell J.L., Collisson B.D., Crysel L., Garrido C.O., Newell S.M. t C.A., Smith C.T.S. & Shepperd J.A. (2013). Managing the threat of impending implicit attitude feedback. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 4, 714–720. [Google Scholar]
14.Howell J.L., Gaither S.E., & Ratliff K.A. (2015). Caught in the Middle: Defensive Responses to IAT feedback among Whites, Blacks, and Biracial Black/Whites. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 6, 373–381. [Google Scholar]
15.Vitriol J. (2017). The (In)Egalitarian Self: On the motivated rejection of implicit racial bias. Manuscript submitted for publication. [Google Scholar]
16.Moskowitz G. & Vitriol J.A. (2021). A social cognition model of bias reduction. In Nordstrom A. & Goodfriend W. (Eds.), Innovative Stigma and Discrimination Reduction Programs. UK: Taylor & Francis Routledge. [Google Scholar]
17.Vitriol J., & Moskowitz G.B. (2021). Reducing Defensive Responding to Implicit Bias Feedback: On the Role of Perceived Moral Threat and Efficacy to Change. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. [Google Scholar]
18.Steele C.M. (1988). The psychology of self-affirmation: Sustaining the integrity of the self. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 21, 261–302. [Google Scholar]
19.Maio G.R. & Haddock G. (2004). Theories of attitude. Creating a witches’ brew. In Haddock G.& Maio G.R.(Eds.), Contemporary perspectives on the psychology of attitudes (pp. 425–453). New York: Psychology Press. [Google Scholar]
20.Maio G.R., Greenland K., Bernard M., & Esses V.M. (2001). Effects of intergroup ambivalence on information processing: The role of physiological arousal. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 4, 355–372. [Google Scholar]
21.Reich T. & Wheeler S.C. (2016). The good and bad of ambivalence: Desiring ambivalence under outcome uncertainty. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 110, 493–508. doi: 10.1037/pspa0000047 [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
22.van Harreveld F., Rutjens B. T., Rotteveel M., Nordgren L. F., & van der Pligt J. (2009). Ambivalence and decisional conflict as a cause of psychological discomfort: Feeling tense before jumping off the fence. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45, 167– 173. [Google Scholar]
23.van Harreveld F., Nohlen H. U., & Schneider I. K. (2015) The ABC of Ambivalence: Affective, Behavioral and Cognitive consequences of attitudinal conflict. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 52, 285–324. [Google Scholar]
24.Katz I., & Hass R. G. (1988). Racial ambivalence and American value conflict: Correlational and priming studies of dual cognitive structures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 55, 893–905. [Google Scholar]
25.MacDonald T.K., & Zanna M.P. (1998). Cross-Dimension ambivalence towards social groups: Can ambivalence affect intentions to hire feminists? Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 24, 427–441. [Google Scholar]
26.Zemborian M.R., & Johar G.V. (2007). Attitudinal ambivalence and openness to persuasion: A framework for interpersonal influence. Journal of Consumer Research, 33, 506–514. [Google Scholar]
27.Rothman N. B., Pratt M. G., Rees L., & Vogus T. J. (2017). Understanding the dual nature of ambivalence: Why and when ambivalence leads to good and bad outcomes. The Academy of Management Annals, 11, 33–72. [Google Scholar]
28.Rothman N.B. & Melwani S. (2017). Feeling Mixed, Ambivalent, and In Flux: The Social Functions of Emotional Complexity for Leaders, Academy of Management Review, Special Issue on Integrating Affect and Emotion in Management Theory, 42, 259–282. [Google Scholar]
29.Rees L., Rothman N. B., Lehavy R., & Sanchez-Burks J. (2013). The ambivalent mind can be a wise mind: Emotional ambivalence increases judgment accuracy. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 49, 360–367. [Google Scholar]
30.Huang L., & Galinsky A. D. (2011). Mind–body dissonance: Conflict between the senses expands the mind’s horizons. Social Psychological & Personality Science, 2, 351–359. [Google Scholar]
31.Kleiman T., & Hassin R. R. (2013). When conflicts are good: Nonconscious goal conflicts reduce confirmatory thinking. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 105,374–387. doi: 10.1037/a0033608 [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
32.Kleiman T., Stern C., & Trope Y. (2016). When the spatial and ideological collide: Metaphorical conflict shapes social perception. Psychological Science, 27, 375–383. doi: 10.1177/0956797615624029 [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
33.Savary J., Kleiman T., Hassin R. R., & Dhar R. (2015). Positive consequences of conflict on decision making: When a conflict mindset facilitates choice. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 144, 1–6. doi: 10.1037/a0038551 [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
34.Sassenberg K., Winter K., Becker D., Ditrich L., Scholl A., & Moskowitz G.B., (2021). Flexibility mindsets: Reducing bias that result from spontaneous processing. European Review of Social Psychology. [Google Scholar]
35.Fong C. T. (2006). The effects of emotional ambivalence on creativity. Academy of Management Journal, 49, 1016–1030. [Google Scholar]
36.Nijstad B. A., De Dreu C. K., Rietzschel E. F., & Baas M. (2010). The dual pathway to creativity model: Creative ideation as a function of flexibility and persistence. European Review of Social Psychology, 21, 34–77. [Google Scholar]
37.Sassenberg K., Moskowitz G.B., Fetterman A., & Kessler T., (2017). Priming creativity as a strategy to increase creative performance by facilitating the activation and use of remate associates. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 68, 128–138. [Google Scholar]
38.Chaiken S., Liberman A., & Eagly A. H. (1989). Heuristic and Systematic Information Processing within and beyond the Persuasion Context. In Uleman J. S., & Bargh J. A.(Eds.), Unintended Thought (pp. 212–252). Guilford. [Google Scholar]
39.Gollwitzer P. M. (1993). Goal Achievement: The Role of Intentions. European Review of Social Psychology, 4, 141–185. [Google Scholar]
40.Sherman J. W., Lee A. Y., Bessenoff G. R., & Frost L. A. (1998). Stereotype efficiency reconsidered: Encoding flexibility under cognitive load. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 589–606. doi: 10.1037//0022-3514.75.3.589 [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
41.Monteith M. J., Ashburn-Nardo L., Voils C. I., & Czopp A. M. (2002). Putting the brakes on prejudice: on the development and operation of cues for control. Journal of personality and social psychology, 83, 1029–1050. doi: 10.1037//0022-3514.83.5.1029 [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
42.Berinsky A. J., Huber G. A., & Lenz G. S. (2012). Evaluating online labor markets for experimental research: Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk. Political Analysis, 20, 351–368. [Google Scholar]
43.Paolacci G., & Chandler J. (2014). Inside the turk understanding mechanical turk as a participant pool. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 23, 184–188. [Google Scholar]
44.Greenwald A. G., Poehlman T. A., Uhlmann E. L., & Banaji M. R. (2009). Understanding and using the Implicit Association Test: III. Meta-analysis of predictive validity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 97, 17–41. doi: 10.1037/a0015575 [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
45.Vitriol J.A., Reifen Tagar M., Federico C.M., & Sawicki V. (2019). Ideological uncertainty and investment of the self in politics. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 82, 85–97. [Google Scholar]
46.Greenwald A. G., Nosek B. A., & Banaji M. R. (2003). Understanding and using the Implicit Association Test: I. An improved scoring algorithm. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85, 197–216. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.85.2.197 [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
47.Devine P. G., Monteith M. J., Zuwerink J. R., & Elliot A. J. (1991). Prejudice with and without compunction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60, 817–830. [Google Scholar]
48.Thompson M. M., Zanna M., & Griffin D. W. (1995). Let’s not be indifferent about (attitudinal) ambivalence. In Petty R. E.& Krosnick J. A.(Eds.), Attitude strength: Antecedents and consequences: 361–386. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. [Google Scholar]
49.Aiken L.S. & West S.G. (1991). Multiple regression: Testing and interpreting interactions. Sage Publications, Inc. [Google Scholar]
50.Krull J.L. & MacKinnon D.P. (2001). Multilevel Modeling of Individual and Group Level Mediated Effects, Multivariate Behavioral Research, 36, 249–277. doi: 10.1207/S15327906MBR3602_06 [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
51.Preacher K. J., & Hayes A. F. (2004). SPSS and SAS procedures for estimating indirect effects in simple mediation models. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, and Computers, 36, 717–731. doi: 10.3758/bf03206553 [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
52.Devine P. G., Forscher P. S., Austin A. J., & Cox W. T. (2012). Long-term reduction in implicit race bias: A prejudice habit-breaking intervention. Journal of experimental social psychology, 48, 1267–1278. doi: 10.1016/j.jesp.2012.06.003 [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
53.Moskowitz G. B., Gollwitzer P. M., Wasel W., & Schaal B. (1999). Preconscious control of stereotype activation through chronic egalitarian goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77, 167–184. [Google Scholar]
54.Monteith M. J., & Mark A. Y. (2005). Changing one’s prejudiced ways: Awareness, affect, and self-regulation. European review of social psychology, 16, 113–154. [Google Scholar]
55.Monteith M. J., Devine P. G., & Zuwerink J. R. (1993). Self-directed versus other- directed affect as a consequence of prejudice-related discrepancies. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64, 198–210. [Google Scholar]

PLoS One. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0264535.r001

Decision Letter 0

Natalie J Shook

28 Aug 2021

PONE-D-21-23604

Internal Conflict and Prejudice-Regulation: Emotional Ambivalence Buffers Against Defensive Responding to Implicit Bias Feedback

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Rothman,

Both reviewers and I found your manuscript very interesting and of great importance. However, several major concerns were raised. In particular, Reviewer 1 questions your conceptualization of emotional ambivalence and provides an alternative explanation for your findings. Reviewer 2 also requests clarification about the construct of emotional ambivalence. Reviewer 1 also wonders how this work can be reconciled with the dissonance literature, which generally shows that internal conflict does not motivate openness. Reviewer 2 raised important questions about the IAT used in your study. Please provide more explanation of the paradigm used, especially the inclusion of flowers and insects. Were steps taken to ensure that your samples are independent? Finally, please include a limitations section to your discussion.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Oct 12 2021 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Natalie J. Shook

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Journal Requirements:

When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements.

1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf

2. Please change "female” or "male" to "woman” or "man" as appropriate, when used as a noun (see for instance https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/bias-free-language/gender).

3. Please include your full ethics statement in the ‘Methods’ section of your manuscript file. In your statement, please include the full name of the IRB or ethics committee who approved or waived your study, as well as whether or not you obtained informed written or verbal consent. If consent was waived for your study, please include this information in your statement as well.

[Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.]

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Partly

**********

2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: I Don't Know

**********

3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: This is an interesting, important, and timely topic. It’s particularly important to identify ways in which people can receive bias feedback more openly, interrogate their own biases, and, hopefully, behave in more egalitarian ways. But I don’t think this work helps us to identify such ways.

Participants took an IAT and then received (randomly assigned) bias feedback. They then reported their “emotional ambivalence,” defensive reactions to the IAT, and bias awareness. The negative affect items of the ambivalence measure weren’t basic PANAS style items, they were: “angry at myself, guilty, regretful, annoyed at myself, disappointed with myself, shame, self-critical.” That is, they were the very sorts of items that would indicate a non-defensive ownership of one’s bias about which one just received feedback. So it’s no surprise that people who reported greater self-directed negative affect after bias feedback also accepted the IAT results and reported more bias awareness.

Thus, I don’t think their results support the claim that ambivalence makes people more open-minded, less defensive, or more aware of their biases. Instead, it only tells us that the sorts of people who feel bad about their biases also own and admit to them.

Other concerns:

As far as I am aware, there is no evidence that ambivalence or dissonance makes people less defensive (the articles the authors cite that suggest this really aren’t that closely related, e.g., the Rees et al. 2013 paper they cite skirts the issue too, and seems to only consider unimportant judgments like temperature, not ego-threatening ones). Most evidence is to the contrary, and interventions to decrease defensiveness (e.g., self-affirmation) are all about making people feel ok; ambivalence doesn’t feel ok. So a dissonance expert would not agree that “internal conflict … motivates a balanced consideration of multiple different perspectives” (p. 4). Consideration, sure; balanced, probably not. And in the ambivalence literature, “response amplification,” whereby people rather vigorously embrace one of two competing positions, is well documented, so there’s not a lot of evidence of balanced reflection here either. Perhaps the authors are onto conditions under which ambivalence or dissonance reduces defensiveness, but given a vast literature to the contrary, I believe they need to address this issue head-on. What’s different about what they’re doing compared to work where defensiveness increases as a function of inner conflict?

I have implied (without direct evidence) that the negative items on their ambivalence measure are doing the work. The ambivalence formula the authors use has a track record, but it doesn’t allow a test of the possibility that one or the other is driving results. A stronger test would test simple effects of negative and positive affect against the ambivalence score. That is, do the patterns the authors report also obtain when examining only negative affect (independently of positive affect)? If so, we’d be back to concluding that people who feel bad about their biases tend to own and admit to them.

Minor point: the claim is that “people do not recognize prejudice in…themselves,” (p. 3), but several studies show that people are in fact aware of their implicitly measured prejudices. They may be unaware of the impact of those prejudices on judgments/behavior, but they are aware of the prejudices themselves.

Reviewer #2: This manuscript examines the relationship between emotional ambivalence and defensive responding to negative feedback in the context of implicit racial bias. The predicted relationship between ambivalence and defensiveness is both intuitive and theoretically-grounded, and the manuscript is well-written. That said, the manuscript can be improved upon in several ways, which I elaborate upon below largely in the order in which they appear in the manuscript.

I’m fairly well-versed in the attitudinal ambivalence literature, but I know less about emotional ambivalence. It would be helpful for the authors to more clearly articulate how they conceptualize emotional ambivalence. Do they understand it to be a trait or a state? I bring up this point because they measured emotional ambivalence after participants completed the IAT and received (or did not receive) feedback. Do the authors understand participants’ emotional ambivalence to reflect that feedback, or is emotional ambivalence a stable disposition of participants? Given that the authors report that there was no main effect of feedback on emotional ambivalence, I assume the latter, but it would be helpful for this point to be clarified. This point would also seem to have implications for application: Do we need to seek out highly emotionally ambivalent people as good candidates for bias reduction, or can we induce people to be emotionally ambivalent to make them more susceptible for bias reduction?

The authors note that they removed non-White participants from their samples “as planned”. I would like for them to elaborate on why they planned to remove non-White participants, and also report whether the results changed when all participants, or at least non-White non-Black participants, are included in the sample. (I carve out this caveat for Black participants given the content of the feedback. It seems reasonable to that Black people would respond differently, e.g., skeptically, to feedback that they are biased against Black people).

OK here’s a really important point: I need for the authors to more clearly describe the IAT that they used, and to articulate the logic behind their choice of stimuli. I would characterize myself as highly familiar with the implicit social cognition literature, and with the IAT specifically. I’ve never heard of an IAT with Black people, White people, flowers, insects, positive attributes, and negative attributes as stimuli. In fact, I can’t even wrap my head around what it might mean to have “pro-White/anti-Black *or* pro-Flower/anti-Insect bias. Without sufficient rationale, this would seem to be a serious threat to construct validity. That said, I understand that the authors intended to use this IAT deceptively, but there are still problems with this approach. They state that “…our goal is to have participants believe it (the feedback) is accurate” (p. 8), but do they have any evidence that participants believed the IAT was legitimate? I mean, I guess that people believed the bogus pipeline, so maybe they believe a Black White Flower Insect IAT measures racial bias? Still, some evidence that the paradigm worked as intended would be helpful. Additionally, the authors used IAT scores as control variables. However, given my serious concerns about the content validity of this IAT, it’s unclear to me what exactly they are controlling for. At minimum, I’m curious to see whether the pattern of results replicate without controlling for scores on this strange IAT.

I’ve patted myself on the back twice in this review so far, indicating literatures with which I am fairly and highly familiar. Now I have to disclose that I am not familiar enough with either of the statistical methods the authors rely on in this manuscript (i.e., MLM, SEM) to critically evaluate their use here. So I won’t comment on that section of the manuscript…

…with one exception. On p.12, the statistics the authors report in text for the analyses 1 SD above and below the mean on emotional ambivalence would seem to be backwards: the Z value at 1 SD below the mean is smaller than the Z value at 1 SD above the mean, but the text describes the opposite pattern of results. Am I confused?

And finally, while I can clearly understand the authors’ rationale for why emotional ambivalence would reduce defensiveness, its less clear to me why emotional ambivalence would also be related to bias awareness. The authors need to make a more compelling case for why we should expect this outcome, and why bias awareness matters in the big picture.

Minor points:

On p.7, the authors state that “…we were able to obtain a large, non-random sample of White Americans with sufficient variability on demographic characteristics…” It’s unclear to me what ‘sufficient’ refers to in this case. Sufficient for what?

Also on p.7, they refer to ‘non-Whites’. Ostensibly there are people in there, so I would encourage the authors to use racial labels as adjectives rather than nouns, e.g., “non-White participants”.

**********

6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.]

While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.

PLoS One. 2022 Mar 17;17(3):e0264535. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0264535.r002

Author response to Decision Letter 0

3 Nov 2021

Dear Dr. Shook,

Thank you for inviting us to revise and resubmit the manuscript (PONE-D-21-23604) entitled Internal Conflict and Prejudice-Regulation: Emotional Ambivalence Buffers Against Defensive Responding to Implicit Bias Feedback for publication consideration in PLOS ONE. We have addressed each comment in the revised manuscript and have responded to each point raised by yourself and the reviewer(s) below.

Comments from Editor

Our Response: Thank you for this opportunity to revise our manuscript.

Both reviewers and I found your manuscript very interesting and of great importance. However, several major concerns were raised.

In particular, Reviewer 1 questions your conceptualization of emotional ambivalence and provides an alternative explanation for your findings.

Reviewer 2 also requests clarification about the construct of emotional ambivalence.

Our Response: We have clarified that high ambivalence does not indicate “people who feel bad about their biases” as suggested by Reviewer 1, but rather, “people who feel emotionally ambivalent in the present moment”. We conceptualized emotional ambivalence as a state experience of positive and negative emotions “in the present moment” and triggered by prior, unrelated experiences. We build on the work on Rees et al., (2013) who study the effects of incidental emotional ambivalence. The emotions literature distinguishes between integral emotions, emotions triggered by the current situation, and incidental emotions, emotions triggered by a prior, unrelated experience (Lerner & Keltner, 2001). Integral emotions are likely to exert a stronger influence on openness to influence than incidental emotion because integral emotions are generated from the decision context itself and are more likely than incidental emotions to be infused into the decision process. Our main focus on incidental emotions serves as a more conservative test of the role of emotional ambivalence on openness to influence. Consistent with our focus on incidental emotions, we did not predict (and did not find) that emotional ambivalence would be caused by the feedback itself.

Reviewer 1 also wonders how this work can be reconciled with the dissonance literature, which generally shows that internal conflict does not motivate openness.

Our Response: We thank Reviewer 1 for raising this concern and challenging us to think more carefully about our conceptualization of emotional ambivalence and its relationship to other perspectives on internal conflict. We provide a comprehensive response to this point below, in which we clarify the critical differences in our approach that we believe create the conditions under which ambivalence attenuates defensive responses to bias feedback (rather than increase defensive responses to bias feedback). We have also included a discussion of this important point in our revised manuscript, in the section now titled, “Differences between Attitude Ambivlaence and Emotional Ambivalence”

Reviewer 2 raised important questions about the IAT used in your study. Please provide more explanation of the paradigm used, especially the inclusion of flowers and insects.

Our Response: We apologize. This was an error on our part. The description we provided (e.g., flowers and insects) included information from the write-up of a different paper results/methods second. We have cut this out, and made sure there are no additional errors in the manuscript.

Were steps taken to ensure that your samples are independent?

Our Response: As in all experiments, the samples are independent and participants were recruited to be in one group of the experiment are prevented from participating in another. To be reimbursed each person needs to have a unique identification code, and one is prevented from signing up for the experiment a second time using the code as a wall. Of course, someone could always establish multiple identities, but this is true of any experiment where a person could produce a false ID if so motivated.

Finally, please include a limitations section to your discussion.

Our Response: We apologize for the omission and have added in a limitations section where we have identified limitations and opportunities for future scholarship.

Reviewer #1 comments

This is an interesting, important, and timely topic. It’s particularly important to identify ways in which people can receive bias feedback more openly, interrogate their own biases, and, hopefully, behave in more egalitarian ways. But I don’t think this work helps us to identify such ways.

Our Response: There are a few separate points embedded in this comment, and we will respond to each, in turn. However, the most important thing to state first is that our prediction and finding is not that people who feel more negative affect will accept the IAT feedback and have more bias awareness. The reviewer would be correct in stating that all we would be showing is that the sort of people who feel bad are the sort of people who own their bias, if all that we predicted and found was an increase in negative emotions led to increases in bias awareness. Such an observation is consistent with a large literature demonstrating the role of guilt and negative affect in the self-regulation of prejudiced-responding (e.g., Devine, Forscher, Austin, & Cox, 2012; Czopp Monteith & Mark, 2006; Monteith, Ashburn-Nardo, Voils, & Czopp, 2002; Moskowitz, Gollwitzer, Wasel, & Schaal, 1999).

But this is not what we predict. It is not just increases in negative emotions that have the effect of reducing defensive responses. Rather, while controlling for both positive and negative affect, we demonstrate that ambivalence is uniquely related to reduced defensive responding and accounts for a larger share of variance in defensive responding than univalent affect. On p.17-18, we now dedicate substantial space to addressing the role of negative affect in our analysis and return to this discussion in our general discussion section. We thank you for encouraging us to clarify the important differences between our work and the prior research on negative emotions.

Next, we turn to the additional points raised by the reviewer. First, you are accurate that in these studies, we have measured emotional ambivalence after participants received (or did not receive, depending on condition) bias feedback. As we describe, we use established methods for measuring and calculating objective emotional ambivalence. Specifically, we had participants report their positive emotions and negative emotions, separately. We used a positive affect measure with items that include both higher activation/arousal positive emotions (e.g., excited, energetic) and lower activation positive emotions (e.g., content, good), rather than just PANAS items that are all high activation. Our measure of negative affect is based on the work by Monteith and colleagues (e.g., Monteith, Devine, & Zuwerink, 1993; Monteith et al., 2002; Monteith, & Mark 2005), some of the only work that examines emotional responses and their relationship with bias awareness and prejudice-regulation.

Then, as is standard in the literature, we utilized the Griffins formula to calculate both the similarity and extremity in the coexisting positive and negative components. The important point is that the calculation takes into consideration the strength/extremity of both positive and negative emotional reactions, simultaneously, as well as the similarity/difference in positive and negative substrates. People can be anywhere on the continuum from low ambivalence (e.g., high negative-low positive; low negative-high positive) to high ambivalence (e.g., high negative-high positive), and we are particularly interested in the benefits of people feeling high levels of emotional ambivalence for their subsequent cognitive processing (e.g., defensiveness). The point is that high ambivalence indicates coexistence of both positive and negative affective states.

To clarify, high ambivalence does not indicate “people who feel bad about their biases” but rather, “people who feel emotionally ambivalent in the present moment” about some prior, unrelated event. We conceptualized emotional ambivalence as a state experience of positive and negative emotions “in the present moment” and, importantly, triggered by prior, unrelated experiences. We build on the work on Rees et al., (2013) who study the effects of incidental emotional ambivalence. The emotions literature distinguishes between integral emotions, emotions triggered by the current situation, and incidental emotions, emotions triggered by a prior, unrelated experience (Lerner & Keltner, 2001). Integral emotions are likely to exert a stronger influence on openness to influence than incidental emotion because integral emotions are generated from the decision context itself and are more likely than incidental emotions to be infused into the decision process. Our main focus on incidental emotions serves as a more conservative test of the role of emotions on openness to influence. Consistent with our focus on incidental emotions, we did not predict (and did not find) that emotional ambivalence would be caused by the feedback itself. We have clarified this point significantly in the revised manuscript in response to your questions and feedback.

Second, because we are conceptualizing this as incidental emotional ambivalence, we did not predict that bias feedback would induce emotional ambivalence. And, we found no evidence that bias feedback did induce emotional ambivalence. RACE IAT D-Scores are not correlated with emotional ambivalence in (.04; See Table 1). So, we don’t think it’s accurate to describe the phenomenon as “feeling bad about their biases”. For two independent reasons. The phenomenon is not about feeling bad but feeling ambivalent. And the feelings are not about the feedback.

Third, we predict that bias feedback will increase defensiveness, and emotional ambivalence will moderate or attenuate this defensive response. Indeed, this is what we find. Thus, it is reasonable to conclude that people who experienced high (vs. low) levels of emotional ambivalence in that moment (which means they feel both high levels of positive and negative emotions at the same time) are less defensive to bias feedback compared to people who experienced low levels of emotional ambivalence (e.g., they are not feeling both at the same time to the same extent).

Other Reviewer 1 Concerns:

Our Response: First, we agree there is no evidence that ambivalence makes people less defensive. We also agree that the Rees et al., (2013) paper focuses on non-threatening decisions, so it’s a different effect than what we are showing here. And further, we agree that most interventions (e.g., self-affirmation) are all about making people feel okay and ambivalence probably does not make people feel okay. This gap in the literature is precisely the one we are addressing.

We appreciate your inquiry about what is different about what we are doing compared to other work that has suggested the opposite. Below (and in the revised manuscript) we clarify the critical differences in our approach that we believe create the conditions under which ambivalence attenuates defensive responses to bias feedback (rather than increase defensive responses to bias feedback).

First, based on prior scholarship, we create dissonance in White individuals through delivering bias feedback (e.g., Vitriol & Moskowitz, 2021). This recent scholarship has led to a research interest in how to mitigate the threat of bias feedback so that people can learn from it. This can be done in one of two general and independent ways – shaping the feedback to be less threatening, altering the state of the individual to be more receptive to feedback. Some scholarship has focused on that first factor, how to deliver this type of feedback to mitigate the threat (Vitriol & Moskowitz, 2021; Moskowitz & Vitriol, 2022). Our focus is on the second factor, how internal individual states – emotional ambivalence - can help to prepare people to receive this threatening bias feedback. We believe emotional ambivalence can do this because it increases individuals’ openness to influence by contextual information (e.g., Katz & Glass, 1979).

Second, traditional approaches to the study of attitude ambivalence build on the dissonance literature, and thus largely assume that ambivalence represents a threatening consistency violation, can be experienced as unpleasant, and lead to negative affect. However, ambivalence does not always produce negative affect or threat. Ambivalence, for instance, can be desirable when an issue is controversial (Maio and Haddock, 2004) can be negatively related to physiological arousal (Maio, Greenland, Bernard & Esses, 2001) and is even cultivated by people in the face of uncertainty in regard to obtaining a desirable outcome (Reich & Wheeler, 2016). As such, ambivalence does not always need to be threatening.

Dissonance is usually the result of behavioral commitment that is in conflict with a pre-existing attitude. The conflict with an attitude, often one that is important to the self, creates threat. Steele calls this a threat to the integrity of the self-system. Thus, dissonance research is about a threat to the integrity of the self-system and is always about removing that threat, with defensiveness being one prominent strategy. In our studies of emotional ambivalence, people do not have to make an unequivocal stance (there is no behavioral commitment), and so we do not believe that emotional ambivalence is experienced as dissonance. There is no threat, and the integrity of the self-system is never challenged. While ambivalence is defined by conflict, it occurs either within one’s attitude but is not related to one’s behavioral commitment (attitude ambivalence) or within one’s emotions and also not related to one’s behavioral commitment (emotional ambivalence). In this way, the emotional ambivalence in our studies remain noncommittal, and so ambivalence is not expected to become particularly unpleasant or threatening (for the reverse argument see Van Harreveld, van der Pligt et al., 2009).

Certainly, the feedback we give people is dissonance arousing. It is intended to. Our concern is with what mitigates feeling defensive in response to that threat. But the emotional ambivalence people experience is not necessarily dissonance arousing. This is why the reviewer’s concern about dissonance always increasing defensiveness is not troublesome to us. We are not studying dissonance as a mitigation tool to dissonance. We are studying emotional ambivalence, a non-threatening state of harboring mixed emotions that promotes openness to influence, not defense of an existing belief, as a means of reducing the dissonance aroused by the feedback. The existing state of having both positive and negative emotions was hypothesized to motivate resolution, but it does so by calling for openness to both sides, not defending one previously existing (and strongly committed) position, as is commonly observed in dissonance-reduction paradigms.

Third, we agree that ambivalence amplification theory is relevant. But we believe our findings are consistent with response amplification findings. This theory suggests that people who are ambivalent are more influenced by the context than people who are not ambivalent (e.g., Katz & Glass, 1979; Katz & Haas, 1988; MacDonald & Zanna, 1998). For instance, research has demonstrated that ambivalent people are more likely to react positively or negatively toward a member of a stigmatized group depending on whether positive or negative situational cues were first provided about a member of that social group, respectively. Specifically, people who have ambivalent attitudes are more likely to exhibit extreme positive or negative behavioral intentions than their unambivalent counterparts, depending on the type of information that they attend to. In contrast, these situational cues do not impact unambivalent participants (MacDonald & Zanna, 1998). By extension, we believe that emotional ambivalence will make people more open to influence by contextual information provided by the experimenter about their race bias.

It’s important to note that our findings are not inconsistent with research that has shown that individuals who are high in attitude ambivalence are more open to persuasion. That is, for example, they can be persuaded by individuals from both their own university and another university, whereas low ambivalent individuals are less open to persuasion, only demonstrating attitude change when the source of the message is the student at their own university (Zemborian & Johar, 2007). Our work advances this scholarship by demonstrating that emotional ambivalence can make people more open to influence from others, even when that information and knowledge provided is potentially self-threatening.

Our Response: The results we report concerning the interaction between ambivalence and bias feedback control for the univalent negative and positive affect in the model. We agree that we can more convincingly demonstrate the unique role of ambivalent affect, so we now note on p.17-18:

“We also conducted an analysis in which we estimated the simultaneous effect of three interaction terms --- feedback condition and positive emotion, negative emotion, or ambivalent emotion -- on defensive responding, again using a multilevel model with maximum likelihood estimation and sample submitted as a random-intercept term. Doing so renders all interaction terms statistically non-significant (ps > .05), which is to be expected, given that ambivalence is computed using positive and negative emotion. Nonetheless, we estimated two models in which we regressed defensive responding on positive, negative, and ambivalent emotion, separately for participants in the Bias Feedback and No Feedback condition. Again, we used multilevel models with maximum likelihood estimation and sample submitted as a random-intercept term. For participants in the No Feedback condition, positive emotion significantly predicted defensive responding (b =-.27, SE = .07, (95% CI = -.41, -.13), p < .001), but neither negative emotion (b = -.05, SE = .12, (95% CI = -.29, .19), p = .69) nor ambivalent emotion (b = -.08, SE = .14, (95% CI = -.35, .19), p = .54) was a significant predictor. In contrast, for participants in the Bias Feedback condition, positive emotion did not significantly predict defensive responding (b = -.10, SE = .06, (95% CI = -.22, .01), p = .08). However, both negative emotion (b =-.20, SE = .08, (95% CI = -.35, -.04), p = .013) and ambivalent emotion (b = -.24, SE = .10, (95% CI = -.44, -.04), p = .02) were significant predictors.

More importantly, because all variables were rescaled to run 0-1, we are able to compare the strength of the relationship between defensive responding and negative or ambivalent emotion in the Bias Feedback condition. Inspection of the unstandardized coefficients indicates that moving from the lowest to the highest levels of negative emotion corresponded with approximately 20% reduction in defensive responding (while controlling for ambivalent emotion and positive emotion), whereas moving from the lowest to the highest levels of ambivalence corresponded with approximately 24% reduction in defensive responding (while controlling for negative and positive emotion). Thus, negative emotion and ambivalence both reduced defensive responding independent of each other, with the latter accounting for a larger share of the variance in the dependent variables than the former. We return to a discussion of the relative effects of negative emotion and emotional ambivalence in the general discussion section.

We have added the following to our discussion section (pp. 22-23)

Second, that negative affect was also associated with reduced defensive responding following bias feedback is consistent with a large literature demonstrating the role of guilt and negative affect in the self-regulation of prejudiced-responding (e.g., Devine, Forscher, Austin, & Cox, 2012; Czopp Monteith & Mark, 2006; Monteith, Ashburn-Nardo, Voils, & Czopp, 2002; Moskowitz, Gollwitzer, Wasel, & Schaal, 1999). Specifically, prior work has shown that self-directed negative affect (i.e., guilt) is particularly beneficial for increasing prejudice-regulation among low prejudiced individuals’ whereas other-directed negative affect (i.e., the desire to avoid general discomfort and social admonishment) decreases prejudicial responding among individuals high in prejudice (e.g., Monteith, Devine, & Zuwerink, 1993; Monteith et al., 2002; Monteith, & Mark 2005). This research has yet to explore whether complex emotions such as emotional ambivalence could motivate increased openness and receptivity to bias feedback. We have shown that negative affect and incidental emotional ambivalence both reduce defensive responding independent of each other, with the latter accounting for a larger share of the variance in the dependent variables than the former. Importantly, by studying incidental emotional ambivalence we are offering a different route for attenuating defensive responses than has been offered in this prior scholarship. Emotional ambivalence is expected to have such an effect through a different mechanism than guilt. Guilt has been studied in terms of goal pursuit. When people do not reach their egalitarian standards, they feel guilty. Guilt then makes people motivated to reach their standards – to be egalitarian - and one way to do this is to seek goal relevant information and become less defensive to bias feedback and more open to awareness of bias. But, the goal of being egalitarian (induced by guilt) could also be achieved by rejecting the feedback and rejecting evidence of one’s bias, hence declaring oneself egalitarian and the feedback wrong. Which of these effects of guilt is found may depend on individual differences. In contrast, we predicted that emotional ambivalence will make people more open to influence by contextual cues (Katz & Glass, 1979) and being more cognitively flexible. As such, they will become more receptive to influence from expert’s knowledge and feedback. Emotional ambivalence does not focus individuals on a particular type of goal or cognition but rather will open them up to influence by all available information. By moving beyond the exclusive focus on univalent integral negative affect (e.g., guilt, discomfort) to emotional ambivalence, our research expands the modal conceptualization of internal conflict in the prejudice-regulation literature. By doing so, we provide additional nuance about how affect shapes bias awareness.

Our Response: We actually wrote “people often do not recognize” not “people do not”. We have added the word “most”. And for those who do, most do not know how it influences them. While some people may show some level of awareness about their scores on implicit measures (e.g., Hahn), many do not. Further, much research in this domain indicates that implicit and explicit attitudes have independent effects on judgment and behavior in socially sensitive domains (e.g., Kurdi et al., 2019). That defensive reactions to implicit bias feedback commonly elicit defensive responses (e.g., Howell et al., 2017; Vitriol & Moskowitz, 2021) and research also indicates that the results of the IAT are often in conflict with beliefs about one’s explicit attitudes, egalitarian norms, and self-concepts. Together, these findings demonstrate that many people are unaware of both their implicit attitudes and its influence on behavior.

Reviewer #2 comments

This manuscript examines the relationship between emotional ambivalence and defensive responding to negative feedback in the context of implicit racial bias. The predicted relationship between ambivalence and defensiveness is both intuitive and theoretically-grounded, and the manuscript is well-written. That said, the manuscript can be improved upon in several ways, which I elaborate upon below largely in the order in which they appear in the manuscript.

Our Response: Thank you for suggestions in this review.

Our Response: We conceptualized emotional ambivalence as a state experience of positive and negative emotions “in the present moment” and triggered by prior, unrelated experiences (see Rees et al., 2013). The emotions literature distinguishes between integral emotions, emotions triggered by the current situation, and incidental emotions, emotions triggered by a prior, unrelated experience (Lerner & Keltner, 2001). Integral emotions are likely to exert a stronger influence on openness to influence than incidental emotion because integral emotions are generated from the decision context itself and are more likely than incidental emotions to be infused into the decision process. Our main focus on incidental emotions serves as a more conservative test of the role of emotions on openness to influence. Consistent with our focus on incidental emotions, we did not predict (and did not find) that emotional ambivalence would be caused by the feedback itself.

Our Response: We agree that examining the experience of defensiveness, and the effectiveness of strategies like emotional ambivalence at mitigating defensiveness, among non-White respondents is an interesting and important research question. However, we are unable to examine that research question using the current data, as we have too few non-White respondents in our samples, rendering tests involving these participants statistically under-powered and results of these tests non-diagnostic of our hypotheses. Further, our theoretical and practical interests concern how members of high-status social groups (e.g., White people) respond to socially undesirable feedback about their implicit bias towards members of low-status, marginalized social groups (i.e., Black people). Such status differences between these social groups likely contribute to critical theoretical and empirical differences regarding the psychological dynamics that underpin (a) responses to feedback about one’s implicit attitudes, (b) perceptions and interpretations of prejudice and discrimination in society, (c) and the internalization of egalitarian norms and beliefs about of one’s personal responsibility in regulating bias. Finally, there are compelling reasons to anticipate that the way in which people respond to feedback indicating bias towards one’s own social group (i.e., Black participants learning about implicit bias towards Black people) is a different phenomenon than how people respond to feedback indicating bias towards an out-group (i.e., White participants learning about implicit bias towards Black people).

In short, examining our research questions among non-White participants is not so simple as testing the same hypotheses on a subset of our participants or on the entire sample; (a) we lack sufficient statistical power to examine non-White respondents separately, (b) are theoretically and practically concerned with White respondents reactions to feedback about bias towards Black people, and (c) believe that this phenomena is quite different for perceiver and targets, low and high-status group members, and in regards to feedback about implicit bias towards the in-group compared to the out-group.

However, because we agree that examining our research questions among non-White participants is an important research question, and because our inability to do that here is a major limitation, we discuss this as a future direction that future research should undertake on p.23.

Our Response: This was an error on our part! The reviewer does know the literature and there is no strange flower, insect, Black, White IAT. We used the standard Black-White IAT and mistakenly included descriptions of a totally separate flower-insect IAT used in a different experiment. We are embarrassed to have allowed that error to go undetected in our methods section and have now fixed it.

Our Response: Z statistics (like t) is not an indication of effect size, but is a function of standard error. The analysis conducted at 1 SD below the mean has a larger standard error than the analysis at 1 SD above the mean, hence differences in Z that are counter-intuitive. To understand the effect size of the bias feedback condition at 1 SD above or below the mean, one should inspect the unstandardized coefficients, given that all variables were rescaled to run from 0-1. As we note on p.16:

“substantively these estimates indicate that for participants with low levels of emotional ambivalence, bias feedback (vs. no feedback) led to approximately a 39% increase in defensive responding; for participants with relatively high levels of emotional ambivalence, bias feedback (vs. no feedback) led to approximately a 25% increase in defensive responding.

Inspection of the standardized coefficients lead to the same conclusion. Also, we graph these effects in Figure 1 to strengthen readers’ intuitions about our results.

Our Response: Bias awareness reflects a person’s understanding that they have bias. One would not be motivated to change one’s behavior without accepting culpability. Our argument is that defensiveness prevents people from accepting that they have bias. The feedback tells them they do, the defensive response renders the feedback wrong or illegitimate, and hence blocks one from seeing bias in the self. Without bias awareness, there is no impetus to change. Thus, the role of emotional ambivalence is to remove the obstacle to bias awareness, defensiveness. With that obstacle removed, the feedback can be received and accepted. This gives it the power to motivate self-regulation. We have included the following improved theorizing in the revised manuscript (pp. 9)

Furthermore, we propose that reduced defensiveness will increase concern about and awareness of one’s implicit racial bias. Because people who are high in bias awareness are attuned to the possibility that they exhibit subtle biases (Perry et al., 2015), this awareness should be higher among individuals who are less (vs. more) defensiveness. Thus, we expected a conditional indirect effect of implicit bias feedback (vs. no feedback) on bias awareness through reduced defensive responding, with individuals high (vs. low) in emotional ambivalence showing reduced defensive responding and, in turn, increased bias awareness. Examining reactions to implicit racial bias feedback is a fruitful domain for testing whether emotional ambivalence increases receptivity to threatening information about the self, and thus greater awareness of bias. To our knowledge, emotional ambivalence has not been examined in the prejudice-regulation domain.

Minor points:

Our Response: As Paolacci and Chandler (2014) note, which we cite in the main text, “In general, workers are diverse but not representative of the populations they are drawn from… In sum, the pool of available workers is large and diverse. It can replace or supplement traditional convenience samples, but it should not be treated as representative of the general population. The sheer size of the MTurk workforce and the possibility to selectively recruit workers…can also make it useful to reach samples with specific characteristics”

Our Response: This is an excellent point and we have sought to revise our language to reflect this perspective throughout the manuscript.

Attachment

Submitted filename: RESPONSE TO REVIEWERS 10.29.docx

Click here for additional data file.^{(45.8KB, docx)}

PLoS One. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0264535.r003

Decision Letter 1

Natalie J Shook

19 Dec 2021

PONE-D-21-23604R1Internal Conflict and Prejudice-Regulation: Emotional Ambivalence Buffers Against Defensive Responding to Implicit Bias FeedbackPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Rothman,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. I greatly appreciate your responsiveness to the first round of reviews. You have done a very thorough job of addressing the reviewers' and my initial concerns, and the manuscript is much stronger. However, a point of clarification has come up with the revised manuscript, regarding the proposition that emotional ambivalence in the current studies is incidental. As the assessment of positive and negative emotion occurred right after receiving bias feedback (or not) and the IAT, it is hard to believe that participants' current emotions were unrelated to study procedures. Ideally, incidental emotions would have been assessed prior to the manipulation. Although the emotional ambivalence index did not differ by condition, did positive or negative emotion differ by condition? A stronger case for emotions being incidental in these studies needs to be made, and the concern about the procedure should be noted in the limitations.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Feb 02 2022 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Natalie J. Shook

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

[Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.]

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: (No Response)

**********

2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

Reviewer #1: Partly

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: I Don't Know

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

Reviewer #1: No

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Reviewer #1: I was perhaps a bit too dismissive of the ambivalence angle and instead fixating on mere negative affect in my first round review. I appreciate that the authors took my confusion as an opportunity to clarify their logic, especially regarding incidental vs. integral affect. However, now I see a clearer disconnect between the logic laid out in the intro and the methods. There’s nothing “incidental” about the emotions people experience immediately after IAT bias feedback, so perhaps I’m missing something when the authors state, “the feelings are not about the feedback.” Why provide the feedback then? I still struggle with the logic here. Did the bias feedback not affect univalent affect? Is emotional ambivalence not computed as a function of positive and negative univalent affect?

It’s really a confusing causal argument, especially given the order of events. Participants take an IAT, get bias feedback (or not), and then complete measures of affect, defensiveness, and bias awareness. The authors are claiming a (moderated) causal relationship between bias feedback and defensiveness, but not a causal a relationship between bias feedback and affect? And then claim that that whatever affect participants experience is “incidental” even though the measure of affect followed the bias feedback? It’s just hard to wrap my head around.

It’s also important to clarify that positive and negative affect alone aren’t driving the defensive responding or bias awareness, and I appreciate the authors’ new analyses that clarify that ambivalence is doing work above and beyond univalent affect.

That said, I still struggle with what those analyses are doing; they are not straightforward and do not give a full view of the pattern of data. The most defensive people, according to Figure 1, are those who received bias feedback and who were the least ambivalent. And it doesn’t really look like the ambivalent people are more open. It just looks like they’re no more defensive than people who weren’t provided IAT feedback. So can it be said that emotional ambivalence opens people up and makes them less defensive?

My summary assessment is that the logic is a bit strange, the design still puzzles me, and the analyses don’t appear to provide a full, thorough window into what the data actually show. I’ve read and re-read it several times and still have a hard time wrapping my head around it.

**********

7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

PLoS One. 2022 Mar 17;17(3):e0264535. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0264535.r004

Author response to Decision Letter 1

1 Feb 2022

Please see Response to Reviewer Document

Attachment

Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.docx

Click here for additional data file.^{(21.6KB, docx)}

PLoS One. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0264535.r005

Decision Letter 2

Natalie J Shook

14 Feb 2022

Internal Conflict and Prejudice-Regulation: Emotional Ambivalence Buffers Against Defensive Responding to Implicit Bias Feedback

PONE-D-21-23604R2

Dear Dr. Rothman,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org.

If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org.

Kind regards,

Natalie J. Shook

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments:

PLoS One. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0264535.r006

Acceptance letter

Natalie J Shook

9 Mar 2022

PONE-D-21-23604R2

Internal Conflict and Prejudice-Regulation: Emotional Ambivalence Buffers Against Defensive Responding to Implicit Bias Feedback

Dear Dr. Rothman:

I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department.

If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact onepress@plos.org.

If we can help with anything else, please email us at plosone@plos.org.

Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access.

Kind regards,

PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff

on behalf of

Dr. Natalie J. Shook

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Associated Data

This section collects any data citations, data availability statements, or supplementary materials included in this article.

Supplementary Materials

S1 File

(DOCX)

Click here for additional data file.^{(224.2KB, docx)}

Attachment

Submitted filename: RESPONSE TO REVIEWERS 10.29.docx

Click here for additional data file.^{(45.8KB, docx)}

Attachment

Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.docx

Click here for additional data file.^{(21.6KB, docx)}

Data Availability Statement

All relevant data files are available from the OSF database (https://osf.io/yre38/?view_only=e6ec0f6759a44bc9ab6c982eaacacf99).

[pone.0264535.ref001] 1.Bobo L., Kluegel J. R., & Smith R. A. (1997). Laissez-faire racism: The crystallization of a kinder, gentler, antiblack ideology. Racial attitudes in the 1990s: Continuity and change, 15, 23–5. [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref002] 2.Norton M. I., & Sommers S. R. (2011). Whites see racism as a zero-sum game that they are now losing. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6, 215–218. doi: 10.1177/1745691611406922 [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref003] 3.Crandall C. S., Eshleman A., & O’Brien L. (2002). Social norms and the expression and suppression of prejudice: the struggle for internalization. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82, 359–378. [PubMed] [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref004] 4.Dunton B. C., & Fazio R. H. (1997). An individual difference measure of motivation to control prejudiced reactions. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 23, 316–326. [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref005] 5.Sears D. O., & Henry P. J. (2003). The origins of symbolic racism. Journal of personality and social psychology, 85, 259–275. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.85.2.259 [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref006] 6.Jost J. T., Banaji M. R., & Nosek B. A. (2004). A decade of system justification theory: Accumulated evidence of conscious and unconscious bolstering of the status quo. Political psychology, 25, 881–919. [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref007] 7.Huddy L., & Feldman S. (2009). On assessing the political effects of racial prejudice. Annual Review of Political Science, 12, 423–447. [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref008] 8.Perry S. P., Murphy M. C., & Dovidio J. F. (2015). Modern prejudice: Subtle, but unconscious? The role of Bias Awareness in Whites’ perceptions of personal and others’ biases. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 61, 64–78. [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref009] 9.Pronin E., Lin D. Y., & Ross L. (2002). The bias blind spot: Perceptions of bias in self versus others. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28, 369–381. [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref010] 10.Czopp A.M, Monteith M., & Mark A.Y. (2006). Standing up for change. Reducing bias through interpersonal confrontation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90, 784–803. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.90.5.784 [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref011] 11.Hillard A. L., Ryan C. S., & Gervais S. J. (2013). Reactions to the implicit association test as an educational tool: A mixed methods study. Social Psychology of Education, 16, 495–516. [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref012] 12.Howell J. L., & Ratliff K. A. (2017). Not your average bigot: The better‐than‐average effect and defensive responding to Implicit Association Test feedback. British Journal of Social Psychology, 56, 125–145. doi: 10.1111/bjso.12168 [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref013] 13.Howell J.L., Collisson B.D., Crysel L., Garrido C.O., Newell S.M. t C.A., Smith C.T.S. & Shepperd J.A. (2013). Managing the threat of impending implicit attitude feedback. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 4, 714–720. [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref014] 14.Howell J.L., Gaither S.E., & Ratliff K.A. (2015). Caught in the Middle: Defensive Responses to IAT feedback among Whites, Blacks, and Biracial Black/Whites. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 6, 373–381. [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref015] 15.Vitriol J. (2017). The (In)Egalitarian Self: On the motivated rejection of implicit racial bias. Manuscript submitted for publication. [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref016] 16.Moskowitz G. & Vitriol J.A. (2021). A social cognition model of bias reduction. In Nordstrom A. & Goodfriend W. (Eds.), Innovative Stigma and Discrimination Reduction Programs. UK: Taylor & Francis Routledge. [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref017] 17.Vitriol J., & Moskowitz G.B. (2021). Reducing Defensive Responding to Implicit Bias Feedback: On the Role of Perceived Moral Threat and Efficacy to Change. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref018] 18.Steele C.M. (1988). The psychology of self-affirmation: Sustaining the integrity of the self. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 21, 261–302. [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref019] 19.Maio G.R. & Haddock G. (2004). Theories of attitude. Creating a witches’ brew. In Haddock G.& Maio G.R.(Eds.), Contemporary perspectives on the psychology of attitudes (pp. 425–453). New York: Psychology Press. [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref020] 20.Maio G.R., Greenland K., Bernard M., & Esses V.M. (2001). Effects of intergroup ambivalence on information processing: The role of physiological arousal. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 4, 355–372. [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref021] 21.Reich T. & Wheeler S.C. (2016). The good and bad of ambivalence: Desiring ambivalence under outcome uncertainty. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 110, 493–508. doi: 10.1037/pspa0000047 [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref022] 22.van Harreveld F., Rutjens B. T., Rotteveel M., Nordgren L. F., & van der Pligt J. (2009). Ambivalence and decisional conflict as a cause of psychological discomfort: Feeling tense before jumping off the fence. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45, 167– 173. [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref023] 23.van Harreveld F., Nohlen H. U., & Schneider I. K. (2015) The ABC of Ambivalence: Affective, Behavioral and Cognitive consequences of attitudinal conflict. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 52, 285–324. [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref024] 24.Katz I., & Hass R. G. (1988). Racial ambivalence and American value conflict: Correlational and priming studies of dual cognitive structures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 55, 893–905. [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref025] 25.MacDonald T.K., & Zanna M.P. (1998). Cross-Dimension ambivalence towards social groups: Can ambivalence affect intentions to hire feminists? Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 24, 427–441. [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref026] 26.Zemborian M.R., & Johar G.V. (2007). Attitudinal ambivalence and openness to persuasion: A framework for interpersonal influence. Journal of Consumer Research, 33, 506–514. [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref027] 27.Rothman N. B., Pratt M. G., Rees L., & Vogus T. J. (2017). Understanding the dual nature of ambivalence: Why and when ambivalence leads to good and bad outcomes. The Academy of Management Annals, 11, 33–72. [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref028] 28.Rothman N.B. & Melwani S. (2017). Feeling Mixed, Ambivalent, and In Flux: The Social Functions of Emotional Complexity for Leaders, Academy of Management Review, Special Issue on Integrating Affect and Emotion in Management Theory, 42, 259–282. [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref029] 29.Rees L., Rothman N. B., Lehavy R., & Sanchez-Burks J. (2013). The ambivalent mind can be a wise mind: Emotional ambivalence increases judgment accuracy. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 49, 360–367. [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref030] 30.Huang L., & Galinsky A. D. (2011). Mind–body dissonance: Conflict between the senses expands the mind’s horizons. Social Psychological & Personality Science, 2, 351–359. [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref031] 31.Kleiman T., & Hassin R. R. (2013). When conflicts are good: Nonconscious goal conflicts reduce confirmatory thinking. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 105,374–387. doi: 10.1037/a0033608 [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref032] 32.Kleiman T., Stern C., & Trope Y. (2016). When the spatial and ideological collide: Metaphorical conflict shapes social perception. Psychological Science, 27, 375–383. doi: 10.1177/0956797615624029 [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref033] 33.Savary J., Kleiman T., Hassin R. R., & Dhar R. (2015). Positive consequences of conflict on decision making: When a conflict mindset facilitates choice. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 144, 1–6. doi: 10.1037/a0038551 [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref034] 34.Sassenberg K., Winter K., Becker D., Ditrich L., Scholl A., & Moskowitz G.B., (2021). Flexibility mindsets: Reducing bias that result from spontaneous processing. European Review of Social Psychology. [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref035] 35.Fong C. T. (2006). The effects of emotional ambivalence on creativity. Academy of Management Journal, 49, 1016–1030. [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref036] 36.Nijstad B. A., De Dreu C. K., Rietzschel E. F., & Baas M. (2010). The dual pathway to creativity model: Creative ideation as a function of flexibility and persistence. European Review of Social Psychology, 21, 34–77. [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref037] 37.Sassenberg K., Moskowitz G.B., Fetterman A., & Kessler T., (2017). Priming creativity as a strategy to increase creative performance by facilitating the activation and use of remate associates. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 68, 128–138. [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref038] 38.Chaiken S., Liberman A., & Eagly A. H. (1989). Heuristic and Systematic Information Processing within and beyond the Persuasion Context. In Uleman J. S., & Bargh J. A.(Eds.), Unintended Thought (pp. 212–252). Guilford. [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref039] 39.Gollwitzer P. M. (1993). Goal Achievement: The Role of Intentions. European Review of Social Psychology, 4, 141–185. [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref040] 40.Sherman J. W., Lee A. Y., Bessenoff G. R., & Frost L. A. (1998). Stereotype efficiency reconsidered: Encoding flexibility under cognitive load. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 589–606. doi: 10.1037//0022-3514.75.3.589 [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref041] 41.Monteith M. J., Ashburn-Nardo L., Voils C. I., & Czopp A. M. (2002). Putting the brakes on prejudice: on the development and operation of cues for control. Journal of personality and social psychology, 83, 1029–1050. doi: 10.1037//0022-3514.83.5.1029 [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref042] 42.Berinsky A. J., Huber G. A., & Lenz G. S. (2012). Evaluating online labor markets for experimental research: Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk. Political Analysis, 20, 351–368. [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref043] 43.Paolacci G., & Chandler J. (2014). Inside the turk understanding mechanical turk as a participant pool. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 23, 184–188. [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref044] 44.Greenwald A. G., Poehlman T. A., Uhlmann E. L., & Banaji M. R. (2009). Understanding and using the Implicit Association Test: III. Meta-analysis of predictive validity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 97, 17–41. doi: 10.1037/a0015575 [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref045] 45.Vitriol J.A., Reifen Tagar M., Federico C.M., & Sawicki V. (2019). Ideological uncertainty and investment of the self in politics. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 82, 85–97. [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref046] 46.Greenwald A. G., Nosek B. A., & Banaji M. R. (2003). Understanding and using the Implicit Association Test: I. An improved scoring algorithm. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85, 197–216. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.85.2.197 [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref047] 47.Devine P. G., Monteith M. J., Zuwerink J. R., & Elliot A. J. (1991). Prejudice with and without compunction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60, 817–830. [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref048] 48.Thompson M. M., Zanna M., & Griffin D. W. (1995). Let’s not be indifferent about (attitudinal) ambivalence. In Petty R. E.& Krosnick J. A.(Eds.), Attitude strength: Antecedents and consequences: 361–386. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref049] 49.Aiken L.S. & West S.G. (1991). Multiple regression: Testing and interpreting interactions. Sage Publications, Inc. [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref050] 50.Krull J.L. & MacKinnon D.P. (2001). Multilevel Modeling of Individual and Group Level Mediated Effects, Multivariate Behavioral Research, 36, 249–277. doi: 10.1207/S15327906MBR3602_06 [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref051] 51.Preacher K. J., & Hayes A. F. (2004). SPSS and SAS procedures for estimating indirect effects in simple mediation models. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, and Computers, 36, 717–731. doi: 10.3758/bf03206553 [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref052] 52.Devine P. G., Forscher P. S., Austin A. J., & Cox W. T. (2012). Long-term reduction in implicit race bias: A prejudice habit-breaking intervention. Journal of experimental social psychology, 48, 1267–1278. doi: 10.1016/j.jesp.2012.06.003 [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref053] 53.Moskowitz G. B., Gollwitzer P. M., Wasel W., & Schaal B. (1999). Preconscious control of stereotype activation through chronic egalitarian goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77, 167–184. [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref054] 54.Monteith M. J., & Mark A. Y. (2005). Changing one’s prejudiced ways: Awareness, affect, and self-regulation. European review of social psychology, 16, 113–154. [Google Scholar]

[pone.0264535.ref055] 55.Monteith M. J., Devine P. G., & Zuwerink J. R. (1993). Self-directed versus other- directed affect as a consequence of prejudice-related discrepancies. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64, 198–210. [Google Scholar]

PERMALINK

Internal conflict and prejudice-regulation: Emotional ambivalence buffers against defensive responding to implicit bias feedback

Naomi B Rothman

Joseph A Vitriol

Gordon B Moskowitz

Roles

Abstract

Introduction

Differences between attitudinal ambivalence and emotional ambivalence

A more flexible and broader processing style

The relationship of emotional ambivalence and prejudice regulation

Current research

Overview and design

Materials and methods

Participants

Procedure

Measures

Table 1. Mean, SD, and correlations between all continuous variables used.

Implicit attitudes

Affect

Defensive responding

Bias awareness

Demographics

Results

Fig 1. Effect of bias feedback on defensiveness by emotional ambivalence.

Fig 2. Conceptual model for SEM analyses.

Table 2. Results from SEM for bias awareness.

General discussion

Limitations

Supporting information

Data Availability

Funding Statement

References

Decision Letter 0

Natalie J Shook

Roles

Author response to Decision Letter 0

Decision Letter 1

Natalie J Shook

Roles

Author response to Decision Letter 1

Decision Letter 2

Natalie J Shook

Roles

Acceptance letter

Natalie J Shook

Roles

Associated Data

Supplementary Materials

Data Availability Statement

ACTIONS

PERMALINK

RESOURCES

Similar articles

Cited by other articles

Links to NCBI Databases