Racial Attitudes toward Black and Asian People: From Chinese International Students Perspective

Abstract

Racial bias has been a controversial topic across nations, especially in Western countries. Prior western research intensively studied the racial attitudes and interracial conflicts of white, black, or other minorities. However, researchers seldomly focus their eyesight on Chinese international students, who are the minority group and temporarily reside in these countries. To address the importance of Chinese international students racial attitudes towards interracial groups and diversify feasible research data, this research used implicit methods and explicit methods to examine implicit and explicit racial attitudes among Chinese international students (N = 27 participants, 13 females and 14 males). Results found that Chinese international students displayed implicit racial preferences for Asians higher than that of Blacks, but there are no explicit racial preferences. Additionally, no correlation was found between implicit and explicit racial biases. These results provide strong evidence for the existence of implicit racial biases and point to the need to reduce these biases among international students.