Employment Discrimination: The Role of Implicit Attitudes, Motivation, and a Climate for Racial Bias.

This study is an attempt to replicate and extend research on employment discrimination by A. P. Brief and colleagues (A. P. Brief, J. Dietz, R. R. Cohen, S. D. Pugh, & J. B. Vaslow, 2000). More specifically, the authors attempted (a) to constructively replicate the prior finding that an explicit measure of modern racism would interact with a corporate climate for racial bias to predict discrimination in a hiring context and (b) to extend this finding through the measurement of implicit racist attitudes and motivation to control prejudice. Although the authors were unable to replicate the earlier interaction, they did illustrate that implicit racist attitudes interacted with a climate for racial bias to predict discrimination. Further, results partially illustrate that motivation to control prejudice moderates the relationship between explicit and implicit attitudes. Taken together, the findings illustrate the differences between implicit and explicit racial attitudes in predicting discriminatory behavior. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Mental evolution and development: Evidence for secondary representation in children, great apes, and other animals.

Recent interest in the development and evolution of theory of mind has provided a wealth of information about representational skills in both children and animals. According to J. Perner (1991), children begin to entertain secondary representations in the 2nd year of life. This advance manifests in their passing hidden displacement tasks, engaging in pretense and means-ends reasoning, interpreting external representations, displaying mirror self-recognition and empathic behavior, and showing an early understanding of "mind" and imitation. New data show a cluster of mental accomplishments in great apes that is very similar to that observed in 2-year-old humans. It is suggested that it is most parsimonious to assume that this cognitive profile is of homologous origin and that great apes possess secondary representational capacity. Evidence from animals other than apes is scant. This analysis leads to a number of predictions for future research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)