INTERPERSONAL RELATIONS AND GROUP PROCESSES Individual Differences in the Regulation of Intergroup Bias: The Role of Conflict Monitoring and Neural Signals for Control David M. Amodio New York University Patricia G. Devine University of Wisconsin—Madison Eddie Harmon-Jones Texas A&M University Low-prejudice people vary considerably in their ability to regulate intergroup responses. The authors hypothesized that this variability arises from a neural mechanism for monitoring conflict between automatic race-biased tendencies and egalitarian intentions. In Study 1, they found that low-prejudice participants whose nonprejudiced responses are motivated by internal (but not external) factors exhibited better control on a stereotype-inhibition task than did participants motivated by a combination of internal and external factors. This difference was associated with greater conflict-monitoring activity, measured by event-related potentials, when responses required stereotype inhibition. Study 2 demonstrated that group differences were specific to response control in the domain of prejudice. Results indicate that conflict monitoring, a preconscious component of response control, accounts for variability in intergroup bias among low-prejudice participants. Keywords: prejudice, control, ERP, ERN, conflict monitoring Especially when inner conflict is present, people put brakes upon their prejudices. They do not act them out— or they act them out only up to a certain point. Something stops the logical progression some- where. (Allport, 1954, p. 332) Since the publication of The Nature of Prejudice in 1954, Allport’s observation that intergroup responses often require reg- ulation has received volumes of empirical support (Devine & Monteith, 1999). Yet half a century later, the mechanisms through which regulatory processes inhibit unwanted racial biases remain unclear. The present research builds on recent advances in cogni- tive neuroscience to illuminate this mechanism and to apply it to an issue that has long perplexed researchers of prejudice: Why are some egalitarians better than others at responding without preju- dice? To date, the prejudice and stereotyping literature has paid little attention to individual differences among low-prejudice peo- ple’s ability to respond without bias and has been virtually silent on the mechanism that underlies these differences. Individual Differences in Responding Without Prejudice Social psychological research on prejudice control has traditionally focused on how attitudes of high- versus low-prejudice people affect their behaviors. In this literature, prejudice control refers to respond- ing with one’s egalitarian intention despite the activation of counter- vailing racial stereotypes. Generally speaking, low-prejudice people are motivated to exert control in their intergroup responses, whereas high-prejudice people are not (Devine, 1989). However, growing evidence suggests that low-prejudice people vary substantially in their effectiveness in regulating expressions of race bias (Devine, Monteith, Zuwerink, & Elliot, 1991; Dovidio, Kawakami, & Gaertner, 2002; Gaertner & Dovidio, 1986). For example, when asked how one should respond toward a Black person versus how one actually would respond in an interaction, many low-prejudice people reveal substan- tial discrepancies between how they should and would behave (De- vine et al., 1991). Low-prejudice participants with large should/would discrepancies are more prone to unintentional expressions of bias, especially in situations involving high cognitive load, in which regu- David M. Amodio, Department of Psychology, New York University; Patricia G. Devine, Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin— Madison; Eddie Harmon-Jones, Department of Psychology, Texas A&M University. This research was funded by National Science Foundation Grants BCS- 9910702 and BCS 0350435, National Institutes of Health Grant T32- MH18931, an APA Dissertation Research Award, and a University of Wisconsin Dissertation Fellowship. This research was conducted as part of David M. Amodio’s doctoral dissertation at the University of Wisconsin— Madison. The dissertation upon which this article is based received the 2004 Dissertation Award from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. We thank dissertation-committee members Lyn Abramson, John Curtin, Richard Davidson, and Jane Allyn Piliavin. We also thank Alison Covert, Annmarie Crampton, Sigan Hartley, and Jennifer Kubota for their assistance in data collection. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to David M. Amodio, Department of Psychology, New York University, 6 Washington Place, New York, NY 10003. E-mail: david.amodio@nyu.edu CORRECTED FEBRUARY 14, 2008; SEE LAST PAGE Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2008, Vol. 94, No. 1, 60 –74 Copyright 2008 by the American Psychological Association 0022-3514/08/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.94.1.60 60