Aversive Racism Research Articles

Explicit Control of Implicit Responses

Research has begun to reveal the malleability of implicit prejudice. One measure of this construct, the race Implicit Association Test (IAT), represents a widely-used tool to assess individuals' positive and negative associations with different racial groups. In two studies, we demonstrate the capacity of salient pressures to alter implicit racial responses. In Study 1, an enhancement of promoting pressures through an explicit instruction to stereotype was sufficient to increase pro-White bias on the IAT. In Study 2, an enhancement of inhibiting pressures through a simple instruction to avoid stereotyping was sufficient to reduce pro-White bias. Taken together, the studies suggest that implicit prejudice is amenable to voluntary control through the use of simple, direct means.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: The Nature of Contemporary Prejudice: Insights from Aversive Racism

Intergroup bias is one of the most actively researched topics in the field of social psychology. Hundreds of books and thousands of research articles have addressed this issue over more than half a century. Although the psychological roots of blatant prejudices are well documented, the development of more subtle and often unintentional forms in societies in which its expression is discouraged poses new and unique challenges to the pursuit of justice and equality in contemporary society. Our interests in the psychological underpinnings of prejudice as researchers and educators are both practical and conceptual. On the practical side, understanding the nature of contemporary forms of prejudice has clear implications for developing effective techniques for combating bias and discrimination. In 1967, nearly 3 years after the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, race riots in the United States prompted the Kerner Commission to investigate the sources of racial tension. Upon the conclusion of its investigation, the commission cited White America’s failure to assist Blacks in need, rather than actively trying to harm Blacks, as a primary cause of racial disparities and, ultimately, civil unrest (Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, 1968). Indeed, it was research on the differential helping behavior of politically liberal Whites toward Black and White motorists who were stranded on a highway that represented the first empirical work on aversive racism (Gaertner, 1973). Considerable subsequent research on aversive racism has revealed that the consequences of subtle bias can be as severe and pernicious as those of blatant prejudice. Conceptually, the complexities of contemporary forms of prejudice and recent advances in techniques and tools for studying non-conscious biases make this research area an exciting and challenging one. We hope that this guide can help orient educators to the many excellent resources that exist and convey our enthusiasm for exploring what psychological methods and theories can contribute to understanding one of the most challenging social issues faced in contemporary society.

Implicit Race Attitudes Predicted Vote in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election

In the week before the 2008 United States presidential election, 1,057 registered voters reported their choice between the principal contenders (John McCain and Barack Obama) and completed several measures that might predict their candidate preference, including two implicit and two self‐report measures of racial preference for European Americans (Whites) relative to African Americans (Blacks) and measures of symbolic racism and political conservatism. Greater White preference on each of the four race attitude measures predicted intention to vote for McCain, the White candidate. The implicit race attitude measures (Implicit Association Test and Affect Misattribution Procedure) predicted vote choice independently of the self‐report race attitude measures, and also independently of political conservatism and symbolic racism. These findings support construct validity of the implicit measures.

Aversive racism and medical interactions with Black patients: A field study

Medical interactions between Black patients and nonBlack physicians are usually less positive and productive than same-race interactions. We investigated the role that physician explicit and implicit biases play in shaping physician and patient reactions in racially discordant medical interactions. We hypothesized that whereas physicians' explicit bias would predict their own reactions, physicians' implicit bias, in combination with physician explicit (self-reported) bias, would predict patients' reactions. Specifically, we predicted that patients would react most negatively when their physician fit the profile of an aversive racist (i.e., low explicit-high implicit bias). The hypothesis about the effects of explicit bias on physicians' reactions was partially supported. The aversive racism hypothesis received support. Black patients had less positive reactions to medical interactions with physicians relatively low in explicit but relatively high in implicit bias than to interactions with physicians who were either (a) low in both explicit and implicit bias, or (b) high in both explicit and implicit bias.

Implicit Racial Attitudes and Law Enforcement Shooting Decisions

Recent cases of police shootings of unarmed Black men have led to a flurry of research on how race may affect the decision of police to shoot. The current study examines how levels of implicit racial bias in samples of both police cadets and college students predict performance on a simulated shooting task. Police cadets had stronger implicit biases against Blacks than college students. Cadets also displayed higher levels of explicit racial bias (as measured by the Modern Racism Scale). Results from the simulated shooter task replicated past results, with armed Black targets yielding the fastest reaction times across groups. However, IAT scores did not predict reaction times on the shooter task, but did predict the number of mistakes made when the target was Black and unarmed. Explicit racial bias correlated with reaction time and mistakes made on the task. These results suggest that future research on implicit bias in law enforcement officers may be fruitful, especially as it relates to shooting decisions.

Response to Dawson and Arkes

The Authors Reply:— Drs. Dawson and Arkes are to be commended on their detailed analysis of our paper. However, as our response indicates, their analysis fails to affect the interpretation of the data we reported. Drs. Dawson and Arkes express concern that our study did not provide the opportunity for residents to list a differential diagnosis for the patient’s chest pain and that we interpreted cross-sectional data as if they were longitudinal data. What they fail to realize is that in the emergency setting, even with a differential diagnosis in mind, a physician must ultimately make a decision as to whether or not to recommend thrombolysis. At least five studies (not conducted by any of us) have demonstrated that African-American patients are less likely to receive thrombolysis under this circumstances. Our concern was not with the role of race in the recommendation of thrombolysis. Rather, we were interested in the degree to which racial bias as measured by a test of implicit race attitude (the IAT) would predict physicians’ recommendation of thrombolysis to black versus white patients. As is routine in such studies (and in the situations physicians commonly face), we designed the vignette to be ambiguous so as to test the direction of decisions that individual doctors would follow. Indeed, we found that IAT scores are correlated with treatment decisions, and that this correlation is opposite for black and white patients. Additionally, given that these are cross-sectional data, we carefully offered no causal claims in the article. Nor do we make any claim regarding the mechanism that produces this relationship. Regarding the use of terms such as “increasing time for association,” “racial preference,” “racial bias,” and “pro-white/pro-black scores,” we agree that these do not represent a sequence of synonyms. However, these terms are appropriate for the context in which they appear in the manuscript and did not seem to mislead our own internal reviewers, the JGIM peer reviewers, or the editors. Regarding our analyses, we understand why Dawson and Arkes were tempted to interpret the interaction plot the way they did. Across social and medical science it is common for scientists to graph interactions with plots depicting both the interaction variance and the main effect variance even though the statistical test of the interaction refers only to the pure (i.e., unique) interaction variance. As such, one is tempted to interpret the means (in the case of a bar graph) or the data points on a line graph (i.e., the four data points the authors refer to and for which a bar graph was provided). However, it is a mistake to interpret the means as part of the interaction when one is interested purely in the nature of the interaction. Interaction plots such as these are not pure interaction plots; they contain variance from main effects. To the extent that main effects are non-zero, an interaction graph will not appear to be a crossover interaction. Any pure interaction looks exactly the same; as a cross-over pattern (see Ralph Rosnow and Robert Rosenthal, 1991).1 Thus, a re-interpretation of our result on this basis is incorrect. Our data show that as physicians’ bias against blacks increased, recommendations decreased. This was the reverse for white patients. This was our modest conclusion, and the one we stand by. We cannot abide by Dawson and Arkes’ suggestion to interpret the behavior of doctors at specific points along the continuum. Finally, due to space limitations, we did not include a detailed discussion of alternative hypotheses. This limitation cannot affect the integrity of the study itself, and we appreciate that Dawson and Arkes have provided these on our behalf.

The Nature of Contemporary Prejudice: Insights from Aversive Racism

AbstractWithin the United States, declines in the overt expression of racial prejudice over several decades have given way to near universal endorsement of the principles of racial equality as a core cultural value. Yet, evidence of persistent and substantial disparities between Blacks and Whites remain. Here, we review research that demonstrates how the actions of even well‐intentioned and ostensibly non‐prejudiced individuals can inadvertently contribute to these disparities through subtle biases in decision making and social interactions. We argue that current racial attitudes of Whites toward Blacks in the United States are fundamentally ambivalent, characterized by a widespread contemporary form of racial prejudice, aversive racism, that is manifested in subtle and indirect ways, and illustrate its operation across a wide range of settings, from employment and legal decisions, to group problem‐solving and everyday helping behavior. We conclude by describing research aimed at combating these biases and identify new avenues for future research.

Transparency should trump trust: Rejoinder to McConnell and Leibold (2009) and Ziegert and Hanges (2009).

The rebuttals offered by the authors whose data we reanalyzed (A. R. McConnell & J. M. Leibold, 2001;J. C. Ziegert & P. J. Hanges, 2005) address secondary issues that do not alter our primary message: Theevidence for the predictive validity of the race Implicit Association Test is too fragile to support thestrong claims that have been made about the pervasiveness of prejudice and the linkages between ImplicitAssociation Test scores and discriminatory behavior. Greater caution in both the legal and scientificcommunities is warranted. Most importantly, scientific research on implicit bias needs greater transpar-ency and willingness to open raw data to critical scrutiny, not greater trust and deference amongresearchers.Keywords: Implicit Association Test, implicit bias, predictive validity, discrimination, replication

Strong claims and weak evidence: Reassessing the predictive validity of the IAT.

The authors reanalyzed data from 2 influential studies-A. R. McConnell and J. M. Leibold and J. C. Ziegert and P. J. Hanges-that explore links between implicit bias and discriminatory behavior and that have been invoked to support strong claims about the predictive validity of the Implicit Association Test. In both of these studies, the inclusion of race Implicit Association Test scores in regression models reduced prediction errors by only tiny amounts, and Implicit Association Test scores did not permit prediction of individual-level behaviors. Furthermore, the results were not robust when the impact of rater reliability, statistical specifications, and/or outliers were taken into account, and reanalysis of A. R. McConnell & J. M. Leibold (2001) revealed a pattern of behavior consistent with a pro-Black behavioral bias, rather than the anti-Black bias suggested in the original study.

Cultural Competency, Race, and Skin Tone Bias Among Pharmacy, Nursing, and Medical Students

The Institute of Medicine report, Unequal Treatment, asserts that conscious and unconscious bias of providers may affect treatments delivered and contribute to health disparities. The primary study objective is to measure, compare, and contrast objective and subjective cognitive processes among pharmacy, nursing, and medical students to discern potential implications for health disparities. Data were collected using a cultural competency questionnaire and two implicit association tests (IATs). Race and skin tone IATs measure unconscious bias. Cultural competency scores were significantly higher for non-Hispanic Blacks and Hispanics in medicine and pharmacy compared with non-Hispanic Whites. Multiracial nursing students also had significantly higher cultural competency scores than non-Hispanic Whites. The IAT results indicate that these health care preprofessionals exhibit implicit race and skin tone biases: preferences for Whites versus Blacks and light skin versus dark skin. Cultural competency curricula and disparities research will be advanced by understanding the factors contributing to cultural competence and bias.

Age, Race, and Implicit Prejudice

Older adults express greater prejudice than younger adults, but it is not clear why. In a community-based sample, we found that older White adults demonstrated more racial prejudice on an implicit measure, the race Implicit Association Test, than did younger adults. Process-dissociation procedures indicated that this difference in implicit prejudice was due to older adults having less control of their automatic prejudicial associations rather than stronger automatic prejudicial associations. Furthermore, this age difference in control was mediated by age-related deficits in inhibitory ability. White participants showed stronger automatic prejudicial associations than did Black participants.

Determinants of Turnout and Candidate Choice in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election

The presence of an African-American candidate on the bal- lot running for President in 2008 raises the possibility that the election outcome might have been influenced by anti-African-American racism among voters. This paper uses data from the Associated Press-Yahoo! News-Stanford University survey to explore this possibility, using mea- sures of both explicit racism (symbolic racism) and implicit racism (the Affect Misattribution Procedure). The parameters of multinomial logistic regression equations were estimated to test the hypotheses that racism might have behaved differently on election day than they would have had racism been eliminated. The findings suggest that racism's impact on the election outcome could have been substantial, by causing (1) people

Editor's Notes

Since the passing of two high-profile state legislative bills aimed at Arizona's Latino residents this past April, the significance of ethnicity for American citizens has once again surfaced as a topic for national debate. Whether to legitimize, or just as frequently deny, what defines American identity, the question and meaning of one's ethnic roots continues to be a contested matter for many Americans. In particular, HB 2281, a bill targeting the restriction of ethnic studies curricula in Arizona's K-12 educational system, has prompted accusations that Ethnic Studies scholarship and teachings work against a unified sense of nationhood by encouraging separatism and anti-American sentiment. Yet, as most Ethnic Studies proponents would counter, it is instead the artificial notion of a monolithic American identity, predicated upon a hegemonic rendering of what it is to be an American, that promotes divisions and distrust within a nation. In either case, the ambivalence over how to read the ambiguities of race and ethnicity implicit in U.S. citizenry underscore the ongoing need to address them. As such, the six authors featured in this issue provide fresh and thoughtful examinations of how race and ethnicity complicate understandings of self. Although diverse in content, the articles collectively consider the effects of how the ambivalence of ethnic origins both expand and challenge the meaning of American identity.

Racing to help: Racial bias in high emergency helping situations.

The present work explored the influence of emergency severity on racial bias in helping behavior. Three studies placed participants in staged emergencies and measured differences in the speed and quantity of help offered to Black and White victims. Consistent with predictions, as the level of emergency increased, the speed and quality of help White participants offered to Black victims relative to White victims decreased. In line with the authors' predictions based on an integration of aversive racism theory and the arousal: cost-reward perspective on prosocial behavior, severe emergencies with Black victims elicited high levels of aversion from White helpers, and these high levels of aversion were directly related to the slower help offered to Black victims but not to White victims (Study 1). In addition, the bias was related to White individuals' interpretation of the emergency as less severe and themselves as less responsible to help Black victims rather than White victims (Studies 2 and 3). Study 3 also illustrated that emergency racial bias is unique to White individuals' responses to Black victims and not evinced by Black helpers.

Differences in Explicit and Implicit Racial Attitudes between Korean and Foreign College Students

본 연구는 한국인들이 인종범주로 구분되는 사회집단(한국인/백인/흑인/동남아인)에 대해 어떤 태도를 보이는지 알아보기 위해 한국 대학생과 국내에 체류하는 외국인 대학생 간에 인종에 대한 암묵적 및 명시적 태도를 비교하였다. 암묵적 연합검사(Implicit Association Test)와 명시적 태도질문지(명시적 선호도검사, 집단에 대한 호감도, 신뢰성, 사회적 거리에 대한 평정척도)를 통해 암묵적 및 명시적 태도를 측정하여 반복측정설계에 의한 변량분석을 수행하였다. 그 결과, 한국인의 인종에 대한 암묵적 및 명시적 태도는 인종범주(한국인/백인/흑인/동남아인)에 따라 현저한 차이를 보였다. 한국대학생은 암묵적 및 명시적 수준에서 모두 강한 내집단 선호를 나타냈으며, 외집단에 대해서는 이중적이었는데 백인에 대해 상대적으로 더 선호적인 태도를 보인 반면, 흑인과 동남아인에 대해서는 비선호적인 태도를 보였다. 국내 체류 외국대학생은 암묵적 태도에서 백인 선호를 나타낸 반면, 명시적 태도에서는 백인선호를 보이지 않았으며 피험자의 인종에 따라 암묵적 수준과 명시적 수준에서 인종에 대한 태도가 각기 다른 양상을 보였다. 그러나 국내체류 외국인과는 달리 한국인은 내집단과 외집단에 대한 태도가 암묵적 수준과 명시적 수준에서 동일한 양상을 나타냈다. 다인종, 다문화, 세계화시대로 전환하는 시점에서 한국인의 인종에 대한 태도특성들을 논의하였다.

The False Paths, the Endless Labors, the Turns Now This Way and Now That: Participatory Action Research, Mutual Vulnerability, and the Politics of Inquiry

Participatory Action Research (PAR) and its many variants are rapidly gaining prominence as viable research tools and methodological alternatives to address histories of exploitation, surveillance, and social exclusion, deeply embedded in mainstream research. However, it is at this transgressive intersection of theory, action, expertise, power, and justice that a host of new challenges to the conduct of research in collaboration with and not just on, or for subordinated people, emerges. This article attempts to intimately describe the challenges of using PAR methods to revise Paulo Freire’s notion of critical consciousness in the context of a parent organizing group and a youth research project, while taking seriously the speed bumps, multiple subjectivities, implicit racism, sexism, classism, and politics of knowledge production that are too often obscured behind published academic writing.

262: Evaluation of Racial Bias in Emergency Medicine Residents and Recent Graduates

Physicians' unconscious racial bias may have an effect on clinical decisionmaking and has been linked to differences in the medical treatment of black and white patients. Validated surveys for implicit (unconscious) racial bias (Race Implicit Association Test, Race IAT) and explicit (conscious) racial bias (Modern Racism Scale, MRS) are currently available, but application of these measures to emergency medicine residents has been limited. We sought to evaluate racial bias in emergency medicine residents and recent medicine graduates, hypothesizing that implicit racial bias scores in these subjects would be similar to those of the general population but would not correlate with explicit racial bias scores.

Internal motivation to respond without prejudice and automatic egalitarian goal activation

Past research has shown that people who are motivated primarily by their internalized beliefs to respond without prejudice are less likely to show implicit forms of racial bias (e.g., Devine, P. G., Plant, E. A., Amodio, D. M., Harmon-Jones, E., & Vance, S. L. (2002). The regulation of explicit and implicit race bias: The role of motivations to respond without prejudice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82, 835–848). We tested the idea that such individuals inhibit implicit race bias by automatically activating egalitarian goals. Study 1 showed that participants high in internal motivation but low in external motivation (i.e., primary internal) displayed more egalitarianism, but only after they had been subliminally exposed to African American faces. Study 2 showed that primary internal motivation was associated with lower levels of automatic stereotype activation and this effect was mediated by egalitarian goal activation. These results provide converging evidence that the relationship between primary internal motivation and low levels of implicit bias stems from the activation of egalitarian goals. We discuss the implications of these findings for efforts to reduce cognitive and affective forms of implicit racial bias.

Glimpses into the Unmentionable: Montserrat, Tourism and Anthropological Readings of ‘Subordinate Exotic’ and ‘Comic Exotic’ Travel Writing

This article explores the relationship between anthropology and identity through the process of travel writing and reading. Specifically, the article examines a range of mid to late twentieth century travel writings about the British Caribbean colony Montserrat to read into the culture of the writer and the assumed reader. These deconstructive ‘glimpses into the unmentionable’ often reveal an implicit racism. The travel writing texts—built upon very brief and often sponsored visits to the island—are also found to copy ideas and themes from each other such as the idea of Montserrat as an imitation of Ireland. Broadly speaking, these travel writings about Montserrat divide into two types of representation—the ‘subordinate exotic’ (‘The Other Emerald Isle’) and the ‘comic exotic’ (an odd ethnic spectacle of the ‘Black-Irish’).

Physician Implicit Attitudes and Stereotypes About Race and Quality of Medical Care

Recent reports speculate that provider implicit attitudes about race may contribute to racial/ethnic health care disparities. We hypothesized that implicit racial bias exists among pediatricians, implicit and explicit measures would differ and implicit measures may be related to quality of care. A single-session, Web survey of academic pediatricians in an urban university measured implicit racial attitudes and stereotypes using a measure of implicit social cognition, the Implicit Association Test (IAT). Explicit (overt) attitudes were measured by self-report. Case vignettes were used to assess quality of care. We found an implicit preference for European Americans relative to African Americans, which was weaker than implicit measures for others in society (mean IAT score = 0.18; P = 0.01; Cohen's d = 0.41). Physicians held an implicit association between European Americans relative to African Americans and the concept of "compliant patient" (mean IAT score = 0.25; P = 0.001; Cohen's d = 0.60) and for African Americans relative to European Americans and the concept of "preferred medical care" (mean IAT score =-0.21; P = 0.001; Cohen's d = 0.64). Medical care differed by patient race in 1 of 4 case vignettes. No significant relationship was found between implicit and explicit measures, or implicit measures and treatment recommendations. Pediatricians held less implicit race bias compared with other MDs and others in society. Among pediatricians we found evidence of a moderate implicit "perceived patient compliance and race" stereotype. Further research is needed to explore whether physician implicit attitudes and stereotypes about race predict quality of care.