You don’t have to be well-educated to be an aversive racist, but it helps

Abstract

People with higher levels of formal education report less prejudice in survey research. Here we present novel evidence on the nature of educational differences in anti-Black attitudes among Whites. We replicate the education effect on explicit self-report measures of anti-Black attitudes, but we find that education is much less related to implicit measures of anti-Black attitudes. Implicit measures differ from explicit measures in that they do not allow respondents to control the measurement outcome; they therefore measure more spontaneous aspects of attitudes. These results shed new light on intergroup attitudes of the higher educated. Higher educated people are more likely to be aversive racists, that is, to score low on explicit, but not implicit measures of prejudice. Given the differential relation of explicit versus implicit measures to behavior, they have wide-ranging implications for the kind of intergroup behavior and discrimination we can expect from less and more highly educated people.