The WIT shares many key features with other tasks often used to assess performance monitoring and adjustment processes, including a structure involving some trials that rely upon prepotent, well-learned response tendencies (i.e., congruent trials) and others that require participants to overcome prepotent response tendencies (i.e., incongruent trials). Because of prevalent racial stereotypes associating young black men with violence (e.g., Correll, Park, Judd, & Wittenbrink, 2002; Sagar & Schofield, 1980), the black face primes produce a bias toward activating the “gun” response (see Payne, 2001, 2005). In other words, black-gun trials are congruent because racial stereotypes and the goal-relevant “gun” response both elicit the same response tendency. In contrast, on black-tool trials racial stereotypes favor the “gun” response, whereas the correct, goal-relevant response is the “tool” response, leading to conflict; therefore, these trials are incongruent. These features have led other researchers to conclude that performance in the WIT relies upon the same cognitive control and performance monitoring processes used to regulate performance in other cognitive control tasks (see Amodio et al., 2004; Amodio, Devine, & Harmon-Jones, 2008; Payne, 2005).
