Research illustrates that the salience of race categories, in turn, increases the likelihood of stereotyping and racially biased
judgments. For example, Mitchell, Nosek, and Banaji (2003) demonstrated that negative automatic evaluations toward Black
people are stronger when participants focus their attention on race categories than when they pay attention to another social
category (see also Macrae, Bodenhausen, Milne, Thorn, & Castelli, 1997). Payne, Lambert, and Jacoby (2002) showed that
drawing attention to race categories increases stereotypical errors in a speeded weapon identification task compared to a
control condition where race was not emphasized. The mechanism underlying these effects is that drawing participants’
attention to category membership activates automatic evaluations associated with these categories, which in turn influences
evaluative judgments and decisions. Given that automatic evaluations of Black people tend to be more negative than those of
White people, this results in judgments favoring Whites over Blacks