Suppression of prejudice and depletion of limited resources: The role of motivational intervention

Recent work has shown that stereotype suppression leads to depletion of regulatory resources. This effect is particularly likely to occur in people with low internal suppression motivation. In this research, we explored the impact of motivation-based prejudice reduction interventions. In two experiments, participants were randomly allocated to four conditions: thought suppression, thought suppression with induced internal or external motivation, and no-treatment condition. They performed a difficult logical and reasoning task, followed by the multi-prejudice scale task (Intolerant Schema Measure) to assess depletion. As compared with participants who did not suppress, participants who suppressed stereotype performed worse at the math task. However, participants with induced internal motivation to regulate prejudice performed better on the math task compared to participants who suppressed the stereotype. The same manipulations failed to increase explicit prejudice. These findings did not support the ego-depletion interpretation and offer evidence for an alternative explanation in terms of Brehm᾿s motivational intensity theory. peerReviewed publishedVersion