Categorical Race versus Individuating Belief as Determinants of Discrimination: A Study of Southern Adolescents in 1966, 1979, and 1993

Abstract

As follow-up on data collected in 1966 and 1979 from ninth-grade students in a county school in North Carolina, data were collected in 1993 from the same school system. The 1966 data included responses only from white subjects, but the 1979 and 1993 data also included responses from both white and African-American subjects. As a test of Rokeach, Smith, and Evans' (1960) belief congruence theory [and also of Fiske and Neuberg's (1990) conceptually overlapping temporal-continuum model], subjects in all three periods responded to four questionnaires supposedly completed by other teenagers. The questionnaires differed according to a categorical race (same or opposite) by individuating belief (similar or dissimilar) design. Subjects responded to each of the four other teenagers by making both evaluative judgments and social distance judgments. Belief dissimilar questionnaires were individually constructed according to the belief attributions that each teenager had previously reported for other-race teenagers. The results for white subjects indicated that belief similarity affected all dependent variables, and that these effects did not differ significantly over the three time periods. However, race effects declined over the three periods, as did perceived social disapproval for cross-race contact in the context of various behavioral associations (working together, marriage, and so on). Furthermore, such social disapproval was correlated with the magnitudes of the race effects—in agreement with predictions from belief congruence theory. For African-American subjects the race main effects did not decline significantly from 1979 to 1993, and there were more complex changes over time, indicating that belief similarity had an increasingly larger effect for same- than opposite-race others. Furthermore, unlike in 1979, the race effects for African-American subjects were not correlated with perceived social disapproval.