There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the
street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery. Then
look around and see somebody White and feel relieved.
Jesse
Jackson
This is partly a housekeeping post.
Several times, I've referred, or wanted top refer, to the Implicit
Association Test (IAT), but didn't want to take the time to explain
it. In the future, I can direct the reader to this post before
continuing.
Before you go on, please go to the
Project Implicit website and take the Race IAT.
You've probably figured out what
happened. The first couple of tasks—classifying faces as black or
white and words as good or bad—were pretty easy. This was largely
a warmup to familiarize you with the procedure. But it became more
difficult when you had to respond to two conceptual dimensions at a
time. On some trial blocks, you were to press one key if either the
face was White or the word was good, and the other key if either the
face was Black or the word was bad. There were also some trials in
which you were to press one key if either the face was White or the
word was bad, and the other key if either the face was Black or the
word was good.
The computer measured your reaction
times. Trials on which you made an error or took an unusually long
time were discarded. If you responded more quickly during the
White-good/Black-bad trials than the White-bad/Black-good trials, the
feedback stated that you had an automatic preference for White people
compared to Black people. If you responded more quickly during the
White-bad/Black-good trials, you had an automatic preference for
Black people. The words "slight," "moderate" and "strong" indicate the degree of preference. An automatic preference for White people means you
implicitly associate Whiteness with goodness and/or Blackness with
badness. The more closely two concepts are associated, the easier it
is to respond to them as a single unit. These implicit associations
are completely automatic and are almost certainly based on past
activation of the concepts through social interaction and media
consumption.
The majority of Americans have an
automatic preference for White people—70%, as opposed to only 12%
who have an automatic preference for Black people. The responses of
African-Americans are less predictable than those of Whites. About
40% prefer White people, 40% prefer Blacks and 20% have no
preference. This suggests a conflict between the messages
African-Americans get from their home and neighborhood, and the from
mass media, where they encounter primarily negative stereotypes of
Black people. The reponses of Asians and Hispanics are
similar to those of Whites.
The results of the IAT suggest that we
may not be willing to report our racial attitudes honestly, or that
we may not be aware of our own racial attitudes. Many people respond
with shock and disbelief when they get their results. I've heard
many rationalizations from students. But all the obvious contaminants such as position preferences and order effects are
corrected for in the data. My own automatic preference for White
people is hard to take given my lifelong attraction to Black culture,
but it pales by comparison to Jesse Jackson's self-reported
discomfort.
Measures of racial attitudes fall into
two broad categories—explicit or self-report measures, in
which people are asked their attitudes directly, and implicit
measures like the IAT that are designed to circumvent our defenses.
There are two types of explicit measures of prejudice. Old-fashioned
racism refers to agreement with statements that are obviously
racist, such as the belief that Blacks are less intelligent than
Whites. Because expressing blatantly racist attitudes is socially
unacceptable, most people score low on measures of old-fashioned
racism, although it does predict membership in the Republican Party.
Modern or symbolic racism (sometimes called racial
resentment) refers to prejudice that is revealed in subtle,
indirect ways, through political beliefs such as the claim that
Blacks receive more favored treatment than they deserve. These
beliefs are correlated both with endorsement of social policies
harmful to Blacks and negative emotional reactions to Black people.
In effect, modern racism takes advantage of the fact that claiming to
be a political conservative gives people plausible deniability of
their racist attitudes. Implicit and explicit racial attitudes are positively related, but not strongly (r = +.35, approximately).
Many people wonder wonder if having an automatic preference for White people means that they are prejudiced.
The fact that we usually define prejudice as a conscious response to
a social situation implies that prejudice and implicit bias are not
the same. On the other hand, IAT scores are not random. There are dozens of studies relating IAT scores to discriminatory behavior in
social perception and decision making, and one analysis of the available studies finds
that implicit measures are more strongly predictive of racial discrimination
than explicit measures.
Can you have an automatic preference
for White people and still be free of prejudice and discrimination?
In terms of the central metaphor of this blog, the IAT represents
System 1 thought, occurring without effort or conscious awareness.
We encounter a Black person and stereotyped thoughts just “happen.”
But the conscious, effortful, deliberate thought of System 2 can override our automatic behavioral tendencies. We can choose to
disregard the stereotyped information that automatically came to
mind. One way of understanding prejudice is to note that White
people low in prejudice recognize their automatic biases and try to consciously control them, while White people high in prejudice either
are unaware of their automatic biases or see no reason to disregard
them.
If you would like to read a thoughtful and accessible article about the IAT, check out this one by Mahzarin Banaji.
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