Perceptions of Rational Discrimination: When Do People Attempt to Justify Race-Based Prejudice? PERCEPTIONS OF DISCRIMINATION KHAN AND LAMBERT Saera R. Khan Department of Psychology Western Washington University Alan J. Lambert Department of Psychology Washington University This research investigated the role of situational context and personality factors in moderating perceptions of race-based decisions made by others. White participants were presented with a short story that described a taxi driver who refuses to pick up a Black man. The primary depend- ent variable concerned the perceived rationality of the taxi driver’s decision. Analyses of these perceptions revealed 2 main findings, both of which involved need for cognition (Cacioppo, Petty, & Morris, 1983). First, need for cognition moderated the effects of participants’ attitudes toward Blacks, such that anti-Black participants judged the taxi driver’s decision as more ratio- nal than did pro-Black participants, but this was only true when participants also scored high in need for cognition. Second, participants who were experimentally induced to think about the task in an “analytical” fashion also judged the taxi driver as relatively rational, but this again was only true for participants who scored high in need for cognition. The implications of these re- sults for a controversial set of arguments regarding rational discrimination by the social critic Dinesh D’Souza (1995) are discussed. Over the last 50 years, stereotyping theorists have offered a number of explanations for why people rely on stereotypes as a basis for responding to single group members. Allport (1954) offered what has become known as the cognitive efficiency perspective on prejudice. According to this view, stereotype use does not reflect flawed psychosocial development (e.g., Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950), and stereotyping is not mediated by displacement of hostility due to frustrating economic conditions experienced by members of the dominant group (Hovland & Sears, 1940). In his critical chapter “The Normality of Prejudgment,” Allport offered a strikingly different perspective in which he stressed the adap- tive value in using stereotypes through their capacity as la- bor-saving devices that assist people in coping with a highly complex environment. As Hamilton and Trolier (1986) noted, a key point in this perspective is that “if we, as social perceivers, were to perceive each individual as an individual, we would be confronted with an enormous amount of informa- tion that would quickly overload our cognitive processing and storage capabilities” (p. 128). Although the cognitive efficiency perspective has had an enormous impact on contemporary research and theory on stereotyping (e.g., Hamilton & Sherman, 1994), psycholo- gists generally have avoided the thorny question of whether using stereotypes is a reasonable or rational thing to do. For good reason, we think. In particular, attempts to discern whether people are “really” acting in rational ways raises several intractable issues. Perhaps most serious is the fact that inferences of rationality are largely a subjective affair (i.e., decisions that seem rational from one person’s perspec- tive might not seem rational from a different perspective). In- stead, researchers generally have sidestepped this issue and focused on the variables that influence whether people, in fact, do use stereotypes. For example, a wealth of evidence has shown that people are more likely to use stereotypes un- der relatively high, rather than low, cognitive load (Bodenhausen, 1990; Macrae, Bodenhausen, Milne, & Jetten, 1994; Pratto & Bargh, 1991; but see Gilbert & Hixon, 1991). Such findings nicely support the cognitive efficiency principle articulated by Allport (1954) while steering clear of BASIC AND APPLIED SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, 23(1), 43–53 Copyright © 2001, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Requests for reprints should be sent to Saera R. Khan, Department of Psy- chology, Western Washington University, Miller Hall Room 220, Bellingham, WA 98225. E-mail: saerak@cc.wwu.edu