Race, Gender, and the U.S. Presidency: A Comparison of Implicit and Explicit Biases in the Electorate.

Gemma Anne Calvert,Geoffrey Evans,Abhishek Pathak

doi:10.3390/bs12010017

Abstract

Recent U.S. elections have witnessed the Democrats nominating both black and female presidential candidates, as well as a black and female vice president. The increasing diversity of the U.S. political elite heightens the importance of understanding the psychological factors influencing voter support for, or opposition to, candidates of different races and genders. In this study, we investigated the relative strength of the implicit biases for and against hypothetical presidential candidates that varied by gender and race, using an evaluative priming paradigm on a broadly representative sample of U.S. citizens (n = 1076). Our main research question is: Do measures of implicit racial and gender biases predict political attitudes and voting better than measures of explicit prejudice? We find that measures of implicit bias are less strongly associated with political attitudes and voting than are explicit measures of sexist attitudes and modern racism. Moreover, once demographic characteristics and explicit prejudice are controlled statistically, measures of implicit bias provide little incremental predictive validity. Overall, explicit prejudice has a far stronger association with political preferences than does implicit bias.

Highlights

Introduction and Theoretical BackgroundSocial psychologists have been using measures of implicit bias since the mid-1980s [1]
These scholars point to evidence that measures of implicit bias are often statistically significant predictors of political attitudes and voting, even in studies that gauge the political preferences of individuals days or weeks after assessing their implicit biases
We found that the measures of implicit bias were far less strongly associated with political attitudes and voting than were the measures of explicit prejudice

Summary

Introduction

Introduction and Theoretical BackgroundSocial psychologists have been using measures of implicit bias since the mid-1980s [1]. On the basis of this literature, a number of scholars have argued that utilizing measures of implicit attitudes can help political scientists to better understand the causes of individual political preferences, especially in socially sensitive contexts [6,7,8]. These scholars point to evidence that measures of implicit bias (e.g., for or against the Democratic Party, or for or against particular Republican candidates) are often statistically significant predictors of political attitudes and voting, even in studies that gauge the political preferences of individuals days or weeks after assessing their implicit biases. Other studies have looked at whether measures of implicit racial bias can predict individual political preferences

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Discussion

Conclusion