Tracking Prejudice: A Mouse-Tracking Measure of Evaluative Conflict Predicts Discriminatory Behavior

Abstract

Explicit evaluations of racial out-groups often involve conflict between opposing evaluative tendencies. Yet this type of conflict is difficult to capture with standard measures of evaluative processing, which either ignore explicit evaluation or capture only the aspects of explicit evaluation that are consciously accessible and freely reported. A new tool may fill this gap in our ability to measure conflict in racial evaluation. This tool, called the mouse-tracking measure of racial bias (Race-MT), is designed to capture conflict in explicit evaluations of racial groups, even if that conflict is neither consciously accessible nor freely reported. We vetted the Race-MT by exploring whether it predicts discriminatory behavior. Across five studies (four preregistered, N = 1,492), we used the Race-MT to measure conflict in people’s positive, explicit evaluations of racial out-groups versus in-groups. These measures predicted discriminatory behavior in a noisy, naturalistic setting, suggesting that the Race-MT provides theoretically meaningful and predicatively useful insights into racial evaluation.