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Previous work has found that white individuals who harbor negative racial attitudes toward blacks are particularly likely to be depleted of executive attentional resources after interracial contact. The present study investigated whether engaging in interracial interactions also depletes the executive resources of black individuals as a function of their racial attitudes toward whites. Black participants completed an unobtrusive measure of racial attitudes, engaged in either an interracial or same-race interaction, and then completed an inhibitory response task to assess executive functioning. Similar to previous research, results revealed that blacks' racial attitudes predicted the extent to which they were impaired on the inhibitory response task after an interracial, but not after a same-race, interaction. Specifically, the more ingroup favoritism individuals revealed on the attitude measure, the more depleted of attentional resources they were after the interracial interaction. Taken together, these results suggest that interracial interactions can be cognitively costly for members of both racial majority and minority groups.
Despite increasing racial diversity in many social arenas in contemporary U.S. society, interracial interactions have been found to be awkward and often distressing (e.g., Blascovich, Mendes, Hunter, Lickel, & Kowai-Bell, 2001; Devine & Vasquez, 1998; Ickes, 1984; Stephan & Stephan, 2001). For instance, several studies have shown that interracial interactions induce threat, as indexed cardiovascularly, in members of nonstigmatized groups (e.g., Blascovich, et al., 2001; Mendes, Blascovich, Lickel, & Hunter, 2002). In addition to being distressing, interracial interactions have recently been found to impair the inhibitory task performance of white individuals, especially if they harbor relatively high levels of racial bias (Richeson et al., 2003; Richeson & Shelton, 2003). Specifically, white individuals performed worse on the Stroop color-naming paradigm-a measure of response inhibition-after interacting with a black confederate, compared to after interacting with a white confederate; and the extent of subsequent impairment was moderated by individuals' scores on a test of implicit racial bias.
Evidence is building to suggest that resource depletion might account for the impact of interracial contact on executive function for white individuals (Richeson et al., 2003; Richeson & Trawalter, 2005). That is, limited resource models of executive function argue that engagement in one task that requires executive control-including conscious self-regulation-impairs performance on a subsequent task tapping this same resource (Muraven & Baumeister, 2000;...