Polarized Opinions on Racial Progress and Inequality: Measurement and Application to Affirmative Action Preferences

This study presents new measures of opinion about progress toward racial equality and provides a multifaceted rationale for preferring the new measures to the old ones. To reduce several sources of measurement error and improve analytic bite by breaking progress into its constituent elements, surveys should ask about past, present, and ideal conditions, not “progress.” These questions reveal racially polarized opinions: Black and White Americans agree on the goal of equality and agree that conditions were worse in the past, but Blacks think conditions were much worse than Whites do. They especially differ in opinions on current conditions and thus in how much change is required to achieve the goal of equality. Blacks see much more current inequality than Whites do. These opinions help explain preferences for affirmative action (AA). Contrary to previously published findings, reactions to AA do not depend on opinions on progress but depend strongly on something related but distinct: how much current racial conditions differ from the ideal. Implications for theories of policy preferences, racial attitudes, progress, and equality are discussed.     

The role of perceived negativity in the moderation of African Americans' implicit and explicit racial attitudes

The present paper examines the relationship between Blacks' implicit and explicit racial attitudes and the extent to which perceived negativity from out-groups moderates the two attitudes. Results from two studies provide converging evidence that perceived negativity is related to both implicit and explicit attitudes, but in opposite directions. While perceived negativity showed a significant positive correlation with in-group bias on explicit measures, it was negatively correlated with in-group bias on implicit measures, such that Blacks who believed that Whites generally dislike Blacks showed significantly lower levels of implicit in-group bias compared with African Americans who believe that Whites positively regard Blacks. African Americans' level of exposure to out-groups was also negatively related to implicit in-group bias, but this relationship was mediated by perceived negativity.     

White guilt and racial compensation: the benefits and limits of self-focus

In two studies, the authors investigated guilt as a response to group-based advantage. Consistent with its conceptualization as a self-focused emotion, White guilt was based in self-focused beliefs in racial inequality. Thus, guilt was associated with belief in White privilege (Study 1) and resulted from seeing European Americans as perpetrators of racial discrimination (Study 2). Just as personal guilt is associated with efforts at restitution, White guilt was predictive of support for affirmative action programs aimed at compensating African Americans. White guilt was not, however, predictive of support for noncompensatory efforts at promoting equality, such as affirmative action programs that increase opportunities (Study 2). In contrast, the other-focused emotion of group-based sympathy was a more general predictor of support for different affirmative action policies. Our findings demonstrate the benefits and limits of group-based guilt as a basis of support for social equality and highlight the value of understanding the specific emotions elicited in intergroup contexts.     

Spirituality and Subjective Religiosity among African Americans, Caribbean Blacks and Non-Hispanic Whites

Patterns and correlates of self-perceptions of spirituality and subjective religiosity are examined using data from the National Survey of American Life, a nationally representative study of African Americans, Caribbean Blacks and non-Hispanic Whites. Demographic and denominational correlates of patterns of subjective religiosity and spirituality (i.e., religious only, spiritual only, both religious/spiritual and neither religious/spiritual) are examined. In addition, the study of African Americans and Caribbean Blacks permits the investigation of possible ethnic variation in the meaning and conceptual significance of these constructs within the U.S. Black population. African Americans and Caribbean Blacks are more likely than Non-Hispanic Whites to indicate that they are "both religious and spiritual" and less likely to indicate that they are "spiritual only" or "neither spiritual nor religious." Demographic and denominational differences in the patterns of spirituality and subjective religiosity are also indicated. Study findings are discussed in relation to prior research in this field and noted conceptual and methodological issues deserving further study.     

Racial Perceptions and Evaluative Responses to Welfare: Does Education Attenuate Race‐of‐Target Effects?

A growing body of research indicates that welfare attitudes may be strongly shaped by negative perceptions of Blacks. This raises questions about what might inhibit the racialization of welfare attitudes. In this vein, a long line of work indicating that education leads to increased tolerance suggests that the relationship between negative racial perceptions and welfare attitudes may be weaker among the highly educated. However, recent studies suggest that the role of education may be more complex: While negative racial perceptions may be less prevalent among the highly educated, the relationship between these perceptions and policy attitudes appears to be stronger among highly educated individuals. The present study attempts to extend this finding by examining the hypothesis that the presence of a racial cue would be more (rather than less) likely to strengthen the relationship between negative racial perceptions and evaluative responses to welfare among college-educated Whites. Data from a survey-based experiment included in the 1991 National Race and Politics Study provided a clear pattern of support for this hypothesis.     

Status-based asymmetry in intergroup responses: Implications for intergroup reconciliation

We studied intergroup responses as a function of relative intergroup status and familiarity. In Study 1, 34 African Americans and 34 European Americans interacted with two members of the out-group in separate, 20-min dyadic interactions. Intergroup perception, affect, and behavior were asymmetric; Blacks differentiated the traits of and the quality of interactions with Whites, whereas Whites did not make these differentiations. Blacks and Whites predicted that different out-group partners perceived them similarly. Study 2 showed that the failure to differentiate an out-group member is due to intergroup status differences. Asymmetric intergroup responses pose a barrier to intergroup reconciliation and explain, in part, why increased interracial contact has not eradicated disparities in life outcomes for Black Americans.     

Target prototypicality moderates racial bias in the decision to shoot

Research shows that target race can influence the decision to shoot armed and unarmed Black and White males (e.g., Correll, Park, Judd, & Wittenbrink, 2002). To date, however, research has only examined category level effects by comparing average responses to Blacks and Whites. The current studies investigated whether target prototypicality influences the decision to shoot above and beyond the effect of race. Here, we replicated racial bias in shoot decisions and demonstrated that bias was moderated by target prototypicality. As target prototypicality increased, participants showed greater racial bias. Further, when targets were unprototypic, racial bias reversed (e.g., participants mistakenly shot more unarmed Whites than Blacks). Study 2 examined whether these effects were observed among police officers. Although police showed no racial bias on average, target prototypicality significantly influenced judgments. Across both studies, sensitivity to variability in Whites' prototypicality drove these effects, while variation in Black prototypicality did not affect participants' decisions.     

Sociodemographic Differences in Humility: The Role of Social Relations

This study examines whether humility is associated with gender, education, and racial/ethnic group. We also investigate how social relations mediate these links across the life course. Data are from the Detroit Community Study, which focused on three prominent groups in the area: Arab Americans, African Americans, and White Americans (N=907). Findings indicate that Arab Americans and African Americans report greater humility than Whites. Further, social relations partially mediate this association, but only among older Arab Americans. Findings are discussed within a developmental science perspective to consider the relational aspects of the individual and context over the life course.     

Perceived Academic Competence and Overall Job Evaluations: Students' Evaluations of African American and European American Professors

Despite the fact that few people appear to endorse negative stereotypes of Blacks, such stereotypes are widely disseminated in our culture. Consequently, such stereotypes can have pervasive consequences on one's impressions of African Americans, even by low-prejudice Whites and by Blacks themselves. Thus, we predicted that student judgments of intellectual competence would be more important when students were making global performance evaluations of Black faculty than of White faculty. Furthermore, to the extent that intellectual competence is more salient in the judgment of Black faculty, such judgments should be essentially the same among Black and White students, and for low- and high-prejudice students. For the most part, analyses of instructor evaluations at a major American university supported these expectations.     

Endorsing Obama licenses favoring Whites

Three studies tested whether the opportunity to endorse Barack Obama made individuals subsequently more likely to favor Whites over Blacks. In Study 1, participants were more willing to describe a job as better suited for Whites than for Blacks after expressing support for Obama. Study 2 replicated this effect and ruled out alternative explanations: participants favored Whites for the job after endorsing Obama, but not after endorsing a White Democrat, nor after seeing Obama’s photo without having an opportunity to endorse him. Study 3 demonstrated that racial attitudes moderated this effect: endorsing Obama increased the amount of money allocated to an organization serving Whites at the expense of an organization serving Blacks only for participants high in a measure of racial prejudice. These three studies suggest that expressing support for Obama grants people moral credentials [Monin, B., & Miller, D. T. (2001). Moral credentials and the expression of prejudice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 33-43], thus reducing their concern with appearing prejudiced.     

What are we studying? Student jurors,community jurors,and construct validity

Jury researchers have long been concerned about the generalizability of results from experiments that utilize undergraduate students as mock jurors. The current experiment examined the differences between 120 students (55 males and 65 females, mean age = 20 years) and 99 community members (49 males and 50 females, mean age = 42 years) in culpability evaluations for homicide and sexual assault cases. Explicit attitude measures served as indicators of bias for sexual assault, defendant, and homicide adjudication. Results revealed that student and community participants showed different biases on these general explicit attitude measures and these differences manifested in judgments of culpability (guilt likelihood, convincingness of state's arguments, convincingness of defendant's arguments, and the defendants' criminal intentions) in sexual assault and homicide case scenarios. The results also showed that student mock jurors were more lenient when assigning guilt in homicide cases than were community members. The implications for future mock jury research are discussed. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Socioeconomic status is not judged equally: Target race shifts standards in interpersonal judgments of SES

Across three studies, respondents made SES judgments of targets varying in Race (White or Black) and SES (Low or High), including global subjective SES, financial success, and educational attainment. As Whites and Blacks are stereotypically associated with upper and lower SES, respectively, the Shifting Standards Model (SSM) of stereotype judgments predicted the pattern of interpersonal objective and subjective judgments. In Study 1, in a between-subjects design, respondents rated Black targets significantly higher on subjective measures than White targets, even as the targets were rated as comparable on objective measures. Study 2 replicated these effects with a broader range of stimulus materials. In Study 3, the shifting standards effect was replicated using a within-subjects design, further supporting the effect. The findings support the application of the SSM to race-based shifts in interpersonal judgments of SES and are discussed regarding their implications for intergroup relations and workplace evaluations.     

The impact of proficiency testing information and error aversions on the weight given to fingerprint evidence

Fingerprint examiners regularly participate in tests designed to assess their proficiency. These tests provide information relevant to the weight of fingerprint evidence, but no prior research has directly examined how jurors react to proficiency testing information. Using a nationally representative sample of American adults, we examined the impact of proficiency testing information on the weight given to the opinions of fingerprint examiners by mock jurors considering a hypothetical criminal case. The fingerprint examiner's level of performance on a proficiency test (high, medium, low, or very low), but not the type of error committed on the test (false positive identifications, false negative identifications, or a mix of both types of error), affected the weight that jury‐eligible adults gave to an examiner's opinion that latent fingerprints recovered from a crime scene matched the defendant's fingerprints, which in turn affected judgments about the defendant's guilt. Jurors who had no information about proficiency gave similar weight to the testimony as jurors exposed to highly proficient examiners, suggesting that jurors assume fingerprint examiners perform at high levels of proficiency unless informed otherwise. We also found that a plurality of Americans deems false acquittals just as aversive as false convictions and a significant minority deems false acquittals more serious. These differences in error aversions predicted differences in evidentiary assessments, suggesting that error aversions of jurors may play an important role in criminal trials.     

Race,Religion, and Anti‐Poverty Policy Attitudes

Using the 2008 National Politics Study, the present study indicates that while African Americans are more likely than whites to hear sermons about poverty and other political issues, hearing such sermons more consistently associates with support for anti‐poverty government programs among non‐Hispanic whites than among both African Americans and Hispanics. The racially/ethnically marginalized status of blacks and Hispanics may contribute to these groups being more receptive than whites to religious messages emphasizing social inequality. The contrasting racial experiences of dominance and marginalization may also help explain why hearing politicized sermons is more meaningful to the progressive social welfare attitudes of whites than to African Americans and Hispanics. This expectation is rooted in the heightened variability of perspectives among whites and their religious organizations regarding the government's role in aiding the economically disadvantaged. Conversely, the vast majority of blacks and Hispanics support the government helping individuals who fallen upon hard times. The greater variability in opinion among whites may also allow for greater differences in opinion to emerge between whites who attend relative to those outside of religious congregations led by clergy emphasizing spiritual and political solidarity with the poor than is the case for African Americans and Hispanics.     

Know Thine Adversary: The Impact of Race on Styles of Dealing with Conflict

Interpersonal conflict management is hampered by ignorance of the cultural norms that characterize an individual's racial group. Blacks' and Whites' conflict-coping preferences were examined in two studies using a scenario that manipulated an offender's race. In Study 1, Blacks, more than Whites, preferred more behaviorally expressive styles of dealing with conflict and eschewed more reserved tactics. Moreover, individuals were less confrontational with offenders of their same racial group. In Study 2, weaker evidence that Blacks prefer more expressive styles of conflict management was observed. Racial differences in attributions of malicious intent of the offender, and in diminished expectations for the relationship, are explored as possible causes of racial differences in conflict management style.     

An Examination of Happiness, Racism, and Demographics on Judgments of Guilt

A policy-capturing study was conducted to evaluate the roles of both plaintiff and defendant race and gender on judgments of criminal guilt in either an assault or a theti case. It was hypothesized that defendant gender and race would affect likelihood of guilt ratings. Moreover, mock jurors' dispositional happiness, scores of modern racism, and race and gender were explored as potential influences on their decision-making policies and judgments. As predicted, strong support was found for the role of defendant gender on judgments of guilt. However, defendant race did not significantly impact guilt ratings. Post hoc analses revealed the importance of race and gender of the victim to juror decisions. In addition, participants' own race and gender played signiticant roles in the decisionmaking policies that were produced. Limitations of the study are discussed. as are topics for future research.     

Social embeddedness and psychological well-being among African Americans and whites

Using data from the National Medical Expenditure Survey, a household survey of more than 18,000 respondents, this study examined racial and gender differences in social embeddedness, an indicator of community well-being and social support. The study hypothesized that higher levels of social embeddedness would be found among African Americans than among Whites and that the association between social embeddedness and psychological well-being would be stronger among African Americans than among Whites. African American men reported themselves more socially embedded overall than White men and, in one instance, their social involvement was especially important in predicting psychological well-being. African American women were more likely than White women to report attending meetings of churches and community groups, but otherwise were less socially involved than White women. There was no evidence of a difference between African American and White women in strength of the connection between social embeddedness and psychological well-being. African American social involvement is more selective than previously believed and generalizations must be qualified on the basis of gender.     

Too Many Blacks,Too Many Whites: Is There Racial Balance?

Racial conflict between African Americans and Whites has been observed to occur most frequently at two critical points: when African Americans make up approximately 30% of a given group or when African Americans make up approximately 50% of a given group. These two critical ratios are referred to as the J and (inverted) U patterns of racial conflict, respectively. To date, most of the data supporting either the J or U models have been derived from large demographic studies that do not directly assess individual perceptions. Thus, little is known about the individual reactions of members from either racial group to varying percentages of group racial composition. This small-group experiment examined the responses of African-American and White subjects to their inclusion in four-person groups of varying racial compositions. Three racial configurations were created and included the following percentages of African Americans: 25%, 50%, and 75%. The results support the U model of racial conflict. Moreover, the U model fit the data equally well for African Americans and Whites.     

The Role of Prototypical Situations in the Perceptions of Prejudice of African Americans1

Inman and Baron (1996) found that African Americans and Whites possess prototypes for racist behavior that involve Whites oppressing African Americans. However, prototypical content may be more detailed and specific for African Americans because of differing cultural experiences. In the present experiment, undergraduates read stories about interpersonal encounters representing prototypical and nonprototypical situations. Actor race ambiguity was manipulated by the presence or absence of photographs. As expected, Whites tended to make equal ratings of prejudiced behavior for prototypical and nonprototypical situations. However, African Americans perceived more prejudice in prototypical vignettes than in nonprototypical vignettes. They also perceived stronger prejudicial displays and more dispositional motivation for targets in prototypical vignettes. The results suggest that African Americans have heightened sensitivity to prejudice in specific situations, a factor that may contribute to racial confrontations and misunderstandings.     

Fear and Implicit Racism: Whites’ Support for Voter ID laws

Oftentimes, Whites are unaware that they may have slighted Blacks. Although researchers have spent a considerable amount of attention disentangling this form of implicit (unconscious) racial bias from explicit (conscious) racial bias, we are less clear about the conditions that cause implicit racism to matter in American politics. In this article, we offer a theory of how fear and Whites' unconscious racial bias are tightly linked in memory, and triggering this emotion can make these implicit attitudes more salient in public opinion. To test our theory, we focus on Whites’ opinions toward voter ID laws. Our expectation is that inducing fear should cause implicit racism to play an important role in Whites’ evaluation of the policy. Using an adult national experiment over two waves, we induced several emotions to elicit fear, anger, or relaxation. The findings show that the fear condition causes Whites high in implicit racism to be more supportive of voter ID laws than similar individuals in the anger and control conditions. On the other hand, fear does not cause Whites high in explicit racism to be more supportive of voter ID laws.