mmhmm.(CNN) -- Would you get upset if you witnessed an act of racism?
A new study shows that many people may unknowingly hold racist views, contrary to how they view themselves.
A new study published Thursday in the journal Science suggests many people unconsciously harbor racist at udes, even though they see themselves as tolerant and egalitarian.
"This study, and a lot of research in social psychology, suggests that there are still really a lot of negative associations with blacks," said Kerry Kawakami, associate professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, Ontario, and lead author of the study. "People are willing to tolerate racism and not stand up against it."
The authors divided 120 non-black participants into the roles of "experiencers" and "forecasters." The "experiencers" were placed in a room with a white person and a black person, who played out pre-arranged scenarios for the experiment. The scenarios began when the black role-player bumped the white role-player's knee when leaving the room.
In the first scenario, the white person did not comment afterwards. In the "moderate" case, the white person said, "Typical, I hate it when black people do that," after the black person left the room. In the "extreme" case, the white person remarked, "Clumsy n****r."
The "forecasters," meanwhile, predicted how they would feel in these situations.
The magnitude of the results surprised even the authors, Kawakami said. Experiencers reported little distress in all three scenarios, much less than the forecasters did in the moderate and severe situations.
"Even using that most extreme comment didn't lead people to be particularly upset," said co-author Elizabeth Dunn, assistant professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
Immediately afterwards, the participants were asked to choose either the black person or the white person as a partner for an anagram test. More than half of experiencers chose the white partner -- regardless of the severity of the comment that person made earlier. As for the forecasters, less than half chose the white partner when a comment was made, but most chose the white person when no comment was made.
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"Some people might think that they're very egalitarian and they don't have to deal with their prejudices, and that's not related to them at all, when in actual fact they may hold these hidden biases," Kawakami said.
The study is consistent with decades of psychology research pointing to the same thing: People are really bad at predicting their own actions in socially sensitive situations.
"That point is getting renewed attention as researchers develop more extensive evidence establishing reasons to distrust self-report measures concerning racial at udes," said Anthony Greenwald, professor of psychology at the University of Washington, who was not involved with the study.
The racism study harkens back to Stanley Milgram's famous experiment that began in the early 1960s, in which most people obeyed orders to deliver electric shocks to an innocent person in the next room. Many psychiatrists had predicted that the majority of subjects would stop when the victim protested, but this was not the case. Read more about the Milgram study
Regarding racism, in a famous study from the 1930s, people behaved in a non-racist manner that contradicted what they reported later. Richard LaPiere sent a Chinese couple to restaurants and hotels in the U.S., and most of these establishments accommodated them. But when LaPiere contacted the same places about whether they serve Chinese people, most said they did not.
More recent work by Greenwald and colleagues shows that most people --between 75 and 80 percent -- have implicit, non-overt prejudices against blacks. Their Web site, Project Implicit, has a slew of tests that Web users can take to compare their self-perceptions to their underlying at udes about people based on different social categories, such as race, age and obesity.
What is responsible for these at udes? Experts say one culprit is images in television, news and film that portray blacks in a negative light.
"I don't think what's in people's heads is going to change until the environment that places these things in their head has changed," Greenwald said.
Parents can also have a big influence, experts say. Related work by Dunn shows that if parents have positive at udes towards blacks, and they have good relationships with their children, then the children will develop more positive at udes towards blacks too.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/01/07...udy/index.html
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implici...takeatest.html <--Test for your Implicit At udes.
Another culprit? Maybe so-called studies such as these and the media coverage they exploit contribute to the general desensitizing of whites to racism. At some point, you probably get so tired of hearing how racist you are that you might begin to become apathetic to racist situations.
I went to a McDonalds once in Chicago and I was the only white person in there... and it was busy. The cooks, the cashiers, the customers; every single person in there besides me was black. And being from white bred SLC it was a major moment of awakening in my life. It was when I realized that racism isn't just bigotry, it's implicit denial of another race's experience. And by that I mean I had never previously or really given consideration to the experiential lives of black Americans, who like me in that McD's situation, are usually in the vast minority (at least where I live). At least I hadn't thought about it in any way that was beyond shallow and cliche. And it changed the way I think about people and race... and my own race. And I'm a better person for it. And I have no doubt that this study, which is more or less about sub-conscious racism, holds a lot of water. Especially pertaining to people who are similar to the person that I previously was.
eh
I didn't like my results
have you heard yonivore's horror story?
It was a BS test. Apparently I love the Jewish religion over all others, when I know for a fact I have equal distain for most religions
yeh, just took some tests on that website. moronic tests.
muscle memory mistakes / mental mistakes = subconcious preferences?
laugh out loud. and then they openly admit that the order of the test given to you does affect the results, but they claim it's not important.
if i temporarily train my brain to associate x with z, and get into a rhythm after answering questions, and then immediately after you mix them up and confuse me, suddenly that's a 'revelation' of my subconcious.
as if HONESTY and just ASKING ME was too hard. i have to have these morons give me bull tests to find the answer about what I REALLY think because we are too stupid to know on our own lol
ing dip s.
I started to take the test too. Didn't finish it. I too, thought it to be moronic.
What's the point? To instill preferences or recognitions you don't have? Repeating the same images that you previously make mistakes on tells me it's conditioning a person rather than testing them.
There are pros and cons in all psychological tests. Y'all aren't the first ones to point them out. Just google the test name and you find plenty of articles, pro and con for the test. I find it rather interesting and even though they are kind of lame, have made me aware of my tendencies.
Well, it shows that I prefer straight people to gay people, which is true.
I took one test, and it was very obvious what they were trying to get the test-taker to do. I will admit that I probably was slower on those sections because I was trying to make sure I did not fall for it, so to speak. They claim is signifies a bias, but to me it signifies the structure of the test. I also got faster as I did more sections so the order of the sections mattered, and I feel they were put in that order on purpose to make it harder in the earlier sections which were the more biased ones.
I was going to take it but I really didn't feel like reading all that at the beginningEveryone is at least a little racist and by that I don't mean you dislike the other races but rather feel a pride for your own race. One of my good friends is black but race is never some sensitive issue that's never played around with. Even he knows that I'm a very proud European descendant. (otherwise known as a white person)
Yeah I think that racism test is actually a lazy test in disguise, I quite about half way through....
Too easy to rig. I did an experiment where I thought of black people I like and white people I dislike for a minute, and took the test. It returned a moderate preference for black people. I then did the reverse, and got the reverse result.
Racism is alive and well and probably always will be.
Plus, everyone knows that racism originated with the Egyptian moon-god Blackses, and all forms of racism since then are simply forms of moon worship.
And Robots.
What's interesting about aversive racism to me -- even if it's not well-founded empirically -- is that it emphasizes how unconscious at udes can trump self-description.
If there is anything to this at all, a clear majority of self-declared anti-racists probably are aversive racists.
Not that there's anything necessarily wrong with that.
But the strong consensus so far against self-reflection, except for ballijuana and ashbeeigh, is telling.
and then...
The authors divided 120 non-black participants into the roles of "experiencers" and "forecasters."
That's just ing classic
I am a bit racist. Anytime I hear about a crime I say to myself " I bet it was some black dude that did it" I think thats the only real racist thing I do.
I do view a black person differently than someone who is white. It's more a 'my kind, their kind' at ude. I find with my age that has been changing, but the pregress is not fast enough for me to have any pride in that.
Last summer I was mugged by two people (black) in Pontiac, MI. I spent the rest of my time there afraid of men and afraid of African American men in particular. I was aware of this, but my emotions weren't letting up.
I'd flinch walking down the street. We laugh at that poster (and should), but that's what I had to catch myself doing. Outside the emotional turmoil a crime creates, I discovered that when I was pushed to the brink, I had latent tendencies to evaluate on skin color.
With the economy as bad as it is here in Southeast, MI, I fear I am not the only one who will be subject to a crime that deepens race tensions. It has made me more viligant on things like opportunity and racial tensions. I don't want to hand to my kids racist tendencies and that means we have to even out our society and quickly before we revert to the American view on skin color, as I did last summer.
I always feel like a blubbering idiotic child when I write on this topic.
Last edited by Darrin; 01-09-2009 at 03:00 PM.
I did not see a concensus against self-reflection, but rather intelligent judgments and discussion as to the validity of the testing measure presented.
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