Why insisting that you are not a racist can backfire

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Newswise – When you insist that you are not a racist, you may unintentionally send the reverse message.

That’s the conclusion of a new study by three researchers at Berkeley Haas who conducted experiments with white participants claiming to have egalitarian views. After asking them to write statements explaining why they did not have prejudices against blacks, they discovered that other whites could nonetheless assess the underlying prejudices of writers.

“Americans almost universally espouse egalitarianism and wish to see themselves as impartial, but racial prejudices persist,” says Berkeley Haas Asst. Teacher. Drew Jacoby Senghor, one of the authors. “Our results suggest that the explicit goal of appearing egalitarian may blind people to the possibility that they can communicate and perpetuate harmful attitudes.”

Co-authored by Derek Brown, PhD 24, and Michael Rosenblum, PhD 20 — a postdoctoral researcher at the NYU Stern School of Business — the study builds on previous research finding that people’s racial biases are escape “through nonverbal behaviors, such as expressions or physical distancing. In a series of experiments published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, researchers examined perceptions based solely on written content.

They selected a group of white participants, eliminating the small percentage who expressed overt prejudices, and rated the subjects’ racial attitudes with two widely used ratings. Subjects were then asked: “Do you believe that all people are equal and should have equal opportunity?” Why or why not ? And “Do you have prejudices against blacks?” Why or why not? ”A second group of white participants, asked to read the written responses, accurately estimated the writers’ score on the bias scale.

Linguistic indices

In a second experiment to determine whether people were intentionally or inadvertently reporting racial attitudes, they asked one group to respond as honestly as possible and another group to respond “in the least harmful way possible.” There was no difference for the readers, who accurately noted the responses of the two groups.

“It gave us some confidence that people naturally try to appear egalitarian, but something in the language they choose betrays them,” Rosenblum said.

What were these linguistic clues? The most powerful indicator, they found, was language that dehumanized or objectified African Americans – for example, “I have a great relationship with blacks.” Other characteristics such as defensiveness, references to personal responsibility or a belief that equal opportunity exists were strongly associated with higher levels of prejudice, and cues such as an emphasis on fairness or recognition of the existence of inequalities were associated with lower levels of prejudice. Interestingly, references to color blindness or mentions of personal contact with blacks were not indicative of the attitudes of the white participants.

“It demonstrates that people’s use of cues is significant not only for the way prejudices are expressed, but also for the way egalitarianism is viewed,” Brown said.

Contagion effect

A third experiment had a sobering result. The researchers found that white participants reported greater biases towards blacks after reading statements from self-proclaimed white egalitarians who scored high on underlying biases. In other words, readers reflected the attitudes of writers, even when they identified themselves as ideologically different (conservatives vs liberals).

“We don’t know if reading other people’s opinions gave them permission to express more prejudice, or if they thought this was the norm and their actual level of prejudice had changed, but there seemed to be a contagion effect, ”Rosenblum said. “One of the lessons here is that words matter. This seems to be one way that prejudice spreads unintentionally. “

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