Agency in the Social World: Racial Bias Expectations and Perceptions of Social Identity Threat Reduce Intentional Binding

Social Identity Threat (SIT) theory suggests that the awareness of a devalued in-group identity can threaten self-related processing and subsequent performance via expectations of bias. We tested this assertion by studying the impact of racial bias expectations on a core aspect of self-consciousness and performance: the sense of agency, that is, the experience of control over one's actions and outcomes. Across a North American and international sample of racialized individuals, we demonstrate that recalling experiences of anticipated racial bias lowers scores on an intentional binding (IB) task, a frequently used index of the sense of agency, with the most pronounced effects among those who perceived SIT as a function of the recalled event. A third control experiment further demonstrates that recalling neutral experiences does not significantly modulate IB. These findings suggest that racial bias expectations and perceived SIT disrupt the sense of agency, uncovering an important self-related process that may drive adverse outcomes for stigmatized groups.