Hidden prejudice can taint whites’ interactions with Blacks
DENVER—Whites who are not aware of having negative attitudes toward Blacks may harbor hidden prejudice that emerges in nonverbal behaviors.
That is the key finding of a University of Michigan study to be presented June 6 in Denver at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Society.
“Our results show that not only can people have biases that they are not even aware of, but also that these biases are revealed during social interactions with people of a different race,” says U-M psychologist Denise Sekaquaptewa, who conducted the study of hidden prejudice with graduate student Penelope Espinoza.
For the study, the researchers recruited 40 white college students and asked them to complete a standard questionnaire about their conscious racial attitudes and two tests designed to measure hidden or implicit prejudice. One of these tests, the Stereotypic Explanatory Bias scale, designed by Sekaquaptewa, is based on completing a series of statements that are either consistent or inconsistent with common racial stereotypes.
When a statement is inconsistent with a stereotype, people with a high degree of hidden prejudice are more likely to add an explanation rather than another kind of continuation, previous research has shown. So the researchers believe that a person’s level of hidden bias can be derived by subtracting the number of explanations provided for stereotype-consistent sentences from the number provided for stereotype-inconsistent sentences.
After taking the tests of conscious racial attitudes and hidden bias, the subjects were introduced to a Black confederate, ostensibly to work together on a problem-solving task, similar to tic-tac-toe. They were left alone for a few minutes, while the researcher supposedly finished gathering the materials. After working together on the task, the confederate, who had no knowledge of the subject’s test scores, rated how much he liked the subject, and how smoothly their interaction went. He also reported whether the subject made eye contact, faced him or looked away, and adopted a closed posture by crossing his or her arms.
“Our results indicate that our implicit prejudice scale was a significant predictor of the nature of the social interaction between white subjects and the Black confederates,” says Espinoza. “Subjects who had high levels of hidden prejudice scale were disliked by the Black confederates, their interactions were rated negatively, and they displayed more negative nonverbal behaviors during the interaction.
“Subjects who scored low on the scale were liked by the Black confederates, their interactions were rated positively, and they displayed more positive nonverbal behaviors during the interaction.”
These results did not emerge when the researchers used the racial attitudes subjects consciously reported to identify people as high or low in prejudice.
In other, similar experiments, Sekaquaptewa and colleagues found that the hidden sexist biases men may have towards women contribute to sexist behavior and influence men’s interactions with women.
“Our work suggests that some people may consciously think they are unprejudiced, but they have hidden prejudice that emerges in negative nonverbal behavior that is picked up on by targets of the prejudice, for example, Black people or women,” Sekaquaptewa says. “So our interactions with members of other social groups can be tainted by stereotypic biases that we do not even know we have.”
About two-thirds of the people Sekaquaptewa has tested have low levels of hidden prejudice.