People Favor In-group Over Out-group Close Friends More Strongly in Automatic than in Nonautomatic Evaluation

In six experiments (N = 2,424), we tested whether group affiliation has a stronger influence on the automatic evaluation of close friends than on nonautomatic evaluation. In Experiments 1 to 5, women showed a stronger pro-women preference in their evaluation of close friends when measured with supposed measures of automatic evaluation (the Implicit Association Test [IAT] and the Sorting Paired Features task) than with a self-report measure. The IAT (but not the self-reported preference) was related to a difference in how close and deep participants perceived the relationship to be (Experiments 3 and 4), but not to self-reported gender identity (Experiment 5). The IAT/self-report discrepancy was the same toward acquaintances and close friends (Experiment 4). We conceptually replicated the discrepancy finding with friends from the ethnic or racial in-group versus out-group (Experiment 6). Our results suggest that even toward highly familiar individuals, people’s automatic in-group preference is stronger than their nonautomatic in-group preference.