Similarly, Fazio and Hilden (2001) examined the effects of a salient social norm, a televised public service advertisement (PSA) regarding racial prejudice. The PSA lasted approximately 25 seconds and showed a Black male from the shoulders up. Text appeared slowly (here a slash indicates a line break): “Michael Conrad. / Male. Age 28. / Armed Robbery. / Assault and Battery. / Rape. / Murder. / Apprehended / August 1994 by / Police Lieutenant / Joseph Cruthers, / shown here.” Participants reported being surprised by the outcome of the PSA. As intended, most viewers wrongly assumed that the man shown was the criminal, not a police officer.

Fazio and Hilden found that those participants with positive racial attitudes, those highly concerned with acting prejudiced, and those with a high restraint to avoid dispute all reported feeling guilty after viewing the video. Fazio and Hilden attributed the feelings of guilt to numerous sources, including Higgins' (1987) self-discrepancy theory. Because the PSA led low-prejudiced participants to react in a seemingly prejudiced manner, which violated their personal values and threatened the way in which they viewed themselves, they felt guilty because they did not react the way that they believed they should have. Similarly, guilt reported by participants highly concerned with acting prejudiced was attributed to them being disappointed in not living up to society's egalitarian values, rather than disappointment in not acting according to their personal standards, as with the previous group of low-prejudiced participants.

As for participants with high restraint to avoid dispute, results indicating that they felt guilty after viewing the PSA supported previous research by Towles-Schwen and Fazio (2001), who studied the childhood experiences of people who had low internal motivation to behave unprejudiced and high external motivation to behave unprejudiced. They found that such participants generally had prejudiced parents and had few unpleasant experiences with Blacks. These participants did not necessarily have non-prejudiced attitudes, but they used non-prejudiced behavior as a means to avoid dispute, which resulted in agitation because of self-discrepancies between behavior and personal beliefs. As Fazio and Hilden later showed, it resulted in guilt as well.

After examining the emotional reactions of participants with different racial attitudes and motivations, Fazio and Hilden (2001) concluded that the PSA was effective in decreasing prejudiced behavior. As shown by Monteith (1993), feelings of guilt (brought on by the PSA) trigger self-regulatory mechanisms, which can lead to a reduction in prejudiced behavior. Research also shows that brief exposure to prejudiced or non-prejudiced norms affects one's expression of prejudice, and long-term exposure to such norms could produce changes in one's attitudes. According to self-perception processes, people want to act consistently with

their personal norms. By causing someone to repeatedly behave non-prejudicially, it is possible that he or she will adopt a less-prejudiced personal belief system to avoid the stress caused by thinking one way and behaving another (Chaiken & Baldwin, 1981).

Our objective was different from those of the studies mentioned thus far. It was not to examine normative influences, but rather the fixed, extreme influence of a model person. In reality, it is difficult to measure the effect that the opinions of an average person have on participants, because there is no one average person. People's mundane interactions vary from person to person; it may be difficult to create a realistic, typical situation. Our manipulation did not involve a complicated cover story, confederate, or social interaction. We were interested in the effect that absolute, highly salient opinions, given by well known figures, either highly prejudiced or non-prejudiced, would have on participants' expressions of racism, participants' opinions of the given individual, and participants' affect (emotional state).

We varied the race (Black or White) and prejudice level (prejudiced or non-prejudiced) of four famous individuals. In general, we expected the low-prejudiced conditions to elicit lower-prejudiced responses than the high-prejudiced conditions. Saucier and Cox (2002) showed that participant expression of racism changed as a function of the believed-to-be-average expression of racism. Similarly, we expected participants to adjust their responses according to model examples. Given an uncommonly low-prejudiced model, participants might feel obligated to live up to non-discriminatory expectations. Similarly, when presented with a high-prejudiced model, participants might relax their inhibitions and give more racist responses. Our reasoning is consistent with research by Crandall, Eshleman, and O'Brien (2002) who found that individuals' reported prejudice levels toward social groups (varying from rapists to blind people) was highly positively correlated with the believed normative appropriateness of the prejudice. Such results support the notion that people express the degree of prejudice that they believe to be socially acceptable. Although the famous individuals that we selected do not represent the social norm, we believed that their opinions would affect the degree of prejudice that participants feel comfortable expressing.

We also predicted that participants presented with the high-prejudiced, Black, famous individual would express greater racism and give more negative evaluations than participants in other conditions. Past research supports this prediction. Henderson-King and Nisbett (1996) found that when White participants observed or heard about negative behavior exhibited by a Black male, participants' reports of corresponding, negative group level stereotypes about Blacks became more salient and participants showed avoidance behavior. The negative behavior of one person affected the manner in which the entire group was perceived. Reading negative statements made by a Black male is likely to have the same effect. We expected that a well-known, negative example of a Black male would cause White participants to reflect on negative, stereotypical, Black attributes and respond in a more prejudiced manner.