[2] Russell Fazio received his Bachelor of Arts from Cornell University in 1974, where he graduated summa cum laude and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa.
[3] He then attended graduate school at Princeton University, receiving his Master of Arts in 1976 followed by his Doctor of Philosophy in social psychology in 1978.
In 2001, he moved to Ohio State University, becoming a distinguished professor of social and behavioral sciences in the Department of Psychology.
An exploratory behavior refers to a novel response when a learner tries to discover which actions produce which outcomes in order to achieve rewards or avoid punishment.
They found out that subjects had learned the valence of outcomes to be expected for various types of beans during exploration and formed attitudes would generalize to other novel stimuli.
[6] David E. Meyer and Roger W. Schvaneveldt laid the groundwork for Fazio's work on affective priming in 1971 with the development of the lexical decision task.
In a 1986 paper, Fazio, Sanbonmatsu, Powell, and Kardes expanded the research on automatic activation to attitudes, reasoning that a similar priming effect should be found.
Participants were primed with attitude objects and were instructed to indicate whether the target word they saw meant “good” or “bad” as quickly as possible.
Both the bogus and the bona fide pipelines attempt to measure attitudes without having to deal with the influences of social desirability.
The validity of Modern Racism Scale as measure of racial attitudes was called into question by the Bona Fide Pipeline results.
Subjects who showed less bias on the Modern Racism Scale exhibited more negativity towards Blacks in Fazio's measures.
The implications of Fazio's results in his Bona Fide Pipeline experiments are that racial biases are often unconscious or implicit.
Fazio concluded that these biases are automatically activated from memory, which means they will relate more to personal experiences than a stereotype.
Fazio suggested that the Modern Racism Scale measures one's willingness to express prejudice, rather than one's actual biases.