Dredd Blog: When You Are Governed By Psychopaths

Myths eventually come home to bite denialists.

Even though they are in power in the U.S.eh? at this time, their myths will catch up with them.

Today I repost episode three (May 9, 2014) of the series on Symbolic Racism (Symbolic Racism: A Look At The Science, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11) so as to fuse it into this current series (When You Are Governed By Psychopaths, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7), since they are quite related.

The previous post in this series is here.

Reprint begins below:

Reference Material

In the first post we looked at the historical basis for slavery written in the U.S. Constitution in 1789, before it was changed by the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, some 76 years later.

In the second post we looked at two scientific concepts, phenotype and genotype.

Our interest concerns how those words relate to our technical concepts of race, so, note that phenotype has to do with our outward physical appearance, while genotype has to do with the genetic make up in the genome (DNA) of the human race.

Before getting into this post, let's take a simple definition of the subject into account:

Symbolic racism (modern-symbolic racism, modern racism, symbolic prejudice) is a coherent belief system that reflects an underlying unidimensional prejudice towards Black people in the United States. These beliefs include the stereotype that Blacks are morally inferior to White people, and that they violate traditional White American values such as hard-work and independence. These beliefs may cause the subject to discriminate against Black people and to justify this discrimination as a concern for justice. Some prejudiced people do not view symbolic racism as prejudice since it is not linked directly to race but indirectly through social and political issues.

Sears and Henry characterize symbolic racism as the expression or endorsement of four specific themes or beliefs:

Blacks no longer face much prejudice or discrimination.
The failure of blacks to progress results from their unwillingness to work hard enough.
Blacks are demanding too much too fast.
Blacks have gotten more than they deserve.
Symbolic racism is a form of modern racism, as it is more subtle and indirect than more overt forms of racism, such as those characterized in Jim Crow Laws.

(Wikipedia, Symbolic Racism). It is not difficult to see how the nation evolved from 1789 when racism was institutionalized (e.g. The Germ Theory - of Government - 7 --as of 2014 "27% of presidents have owned slaves"), to 1865 when slavery was outlawed.

It is also not so difficult to see how that social evolution continued on in the late 19th century, when Jim Crow Laws began to replace overt slavery, until 1964, when the Civil Rights Act was passed to outlaw Jim Crow Laws (segregation, etc.).

It is, however, much more difficult to see the remaining racial prejudices because in a sense the social evolution that has taken place since 1964 is more internalized and subconscious than it was in earlier times when it was out in the open for all to see.

Concepts and phrases such as forms of racism, modern racism, old-fashioned racism, implicit racism, explicit racism, a new form of racism, and a new expression of racism serve to show that social evolution of racism takes place as we struggle to remove it from our culture.

So we use "symbolic racism" as an expansive way to refer to the current state of the evolution of racism in our culture (as it very slowly subsides).

Since the reference library is contained in this post, making it already huge, I will refer to only two dynamics of symbolic racism generators or eradicators in our current society, i.e., religious and family teachings about race:

"For example, children develop notions about ethnicity and race early in life, oftentimes even before they have interethnic or interracial contact. Children learn about other social categories, such as gender-or age-related groupings, through extensive interpersonal interactions, but young, preschool children often learn about those who are ethnically or racially different in the absence of personal contact." ⁸⁶
...
"Our findings suggest that attitudes about Obama's religious affiliation were significantly influenced by symbolic racism. These findings suggest that the American public dialogue about racial politics has evolved in recent years to include religious denominations." ¹⁹

The method of referring to research material is an elevated number⁸⁶ in bold, which in this case is an "86" and a "19", meaning that the quote comes from paper number "86" and paper number "19" in the research material list below.

On my browser I use "CTRL F" to start a search, then I enter "86." or "19." to search for paper 86. or paper 19. (be sure to use the period after the number of the paper you are searching for).

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

Series Research Library

Let's now take a look at the subject matter materials collected from current ongoing scientific studies, using these materials as a sort of reference library for this and other posts to come along in due time.

Compilation of Research Material

The first thing I did was to collect some research material, which involves 85 scientific papers and one book, numbered "1" through "86", with "86" referring to the book, and 1-85 referring to papers in scientific journals.

After compiling the abstracts (a summary of each paper), I searched for certain words and phrases in those abstracts, not as a comprehensive list of all relevant words or phrases, but representative of aspects of the subject matter.

I noted where, in the numbered Materials List, those words and phrases appeared by a comma delimited list of reference numbers to the scientific paper or book where those words or phrases are used.

I. Words or Phrases of Interest That Appear in the Abstracts

race: 2, 7, 8, 14, 18, 21, 24, 36, 37, 38, 44, 45, 46, 48, 51, 53, 57, 71, 73, 76, 78, 79, 82, 85, 86

racial: 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 19, 20, 21, 24, 26, 30, 31, 32, 36, 37, 38, 40, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 53, 54, 56, 59, 71, 72, 73, 75, 78, 80, 82, 83, 84, 85

racially: 2, 37, 59, 86

symbolic racism: 4, 8, 19, 25, 26, 28, 38, 46, 49, 53, 56, 57, 59, 67, 78, 84, 85
forms of racism: 15,
modern racism: 15, 29, 66, 73,
old-fashioned racism: 15, 77, 84,
implicit racism: 21
explicit racism: 25
a new form of racism: 28
a new expression of racism: 28, 54
white racism: 45
prejudice/racism: 52

The list of 46 journals and/or journal-type sources, plus one book, are indexed below in the order of their appearance in the Materials List (some journals are the source of more than one paper).

The year each was published is: 2014 (1-6); 2013 (7-21); 2012 (22-30); 2011 (31-40); 2010 (41-50,86); 2009 (51-59); 2008 (60-65); 2007 (66-74); 2006 (75-81); 2005 (82-84); and 2003 (85). The material is recent.

II. Index of Reference Material in the Materials List

The Social Science Journal: 1, 26
American Journal of Political Science: 2, 21, 82
Criminology: 3
Political Psychology: 4, 56, 59, 74, 80, 81, 83
Basic and Applied Social Psychology: 5, 58
Social Science Research: 6, 9, 79
Political Behavior: 7, 35, 45, 48, 57
Race and Social Problems: 8, 51
Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy: 10, 53
Sociological Inquiry: 11
International Migration Review: 12
Migration Studies: 13
Journal of Teaching in Social Work: 14
Journal of Applied Social Psychology: 15, 27, 63, 66
European Journal of Social Psychology: 16, 73
Social Issues and Policy Review: 17
Psychiatry, Psychology and Law: 18
Social Science Quarterly: 19, 37
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology: 20, 25, 30, 32, 38, 39, 42, 76
Psychological Reports: 22
American Journal of Community Psychology: 23
Housing Studies: 24
Social Justice Research: 28, 43
Motivation and Emotion: 29, 31
Quality & Quantity: 33
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies: 34, 70
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: 36
Electoral Studies: 40
Journal of Media Psychology: Theories, Methods, and Applications: 41
Presidential Studies Quarterly: 44, 49
Journal of Social Philosophy: 46
American Political Science Review: 47
Social Cognition: 50
International Journal of Intercultural Relations: 52
Annual Review of Political Science: 54
Social and Personality Psychology Compass: 55, 64
Journal of Research in Personality: 60
Psychological Inquiry: 61, 62, 65
British Journal of Social Psychology: 67
International Journal of Psychology: 68
Journal of Business and Psychology: 69
Psychological Science: 71
American Journal of Public Health: 72
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: 75, 77, 85
Law and Human Behavior: 78
Journal of Politics: 84
Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Childhood Social Development: 86

The following "Materials List" contains a Dredd Blog document reference number followed by a period, a citation, and the text of the "abstract," which is a short summary of the full paper.

III. Materials List, with Citations & Abstracts

1. Jeffrey D. Holmes, Impression management pressures on racial attitude surveys, The Social Science Journal, 2014,

For decades, researchers have expressed concern that self-report racial attitude measures are vulnerable to distortion from pressures respondents feel to present themselves as unprejudiced. A common response to this problem is to measure social desirability separately from racial attitudes and control for its variance in statistical analyses. The present study is designed to test whether such controls are sufficient. Participants rated items from both racial attitude and social desirability scales in terms of the amount of pressure they would feel to respond in a particular way regardless of their true attitudes. Participants report significantly greater response pressure on racial attitude items than on social desirability items, and ratings on the two types of items have only moderately shared variance. Implications for controlling social desirability in racial attitude research are discussed.

2. Christopher R. Weber, Howard Lavine, Leonie Huddy, Christopher M. Federico, Placing Racial Stereotypes in Context: Social Desirability and the Politics of Racial Hostility, American Journal of Political Science, 2014, 58, 1

Past research indicates that diversity at the level of larger geographic units (e.g., counties) is linked to white racial hostility. However, research has not addressed whether diverse local contexts may strengthen or weaken the relationship between racial stereotypes and policy attitudes. In a statewide opinion survey, we find that black-white racial diversity at the zip-code level strengthens the connection between racial stereotypes and race-related policy attitudes among whites. Moreover, this effect is most pronounced among low self-monitors, individuals who are relatively immune to the effects of egalitarian social norms likely to develop within a racially diverse local area. We find that this racializing effect is most evident for stereotypes (e.g., African Americans are “violent”) that are “relevant” to a given policy (e.g., capital punishment). Our findings lend nuance to research on the political effects of racial attitudes and confirm the racializing political effects of diverse residential settings on white Americans.

3. Justin T. Pickett, Thomas Baker, The Pragmatic American: Empirical Reality or Methodological Artifact?, Criminology, 2014, 52, 1

Scholars widely agree that the public is pragmatic about criminal justice. The empirical basis for this conclusion is the failure in several previous studies to find a sizable negative relationship between dispositional and situational crime attributions, or between support for punitive and rehabilitative crime policies. We suggest, however, that public pragmatism may be an artifact of the use of unidirectional question batteries in prior research to measure attribution styles and policy support. When such questions are used, acquiescent responding can introduce systematic error that is positively correlated across items and scales. Drawing on data from an experiment with a national sample (N = 826) of Internet panelists, we examine how this methodological approach impacts the bivariate correlations and multivariate relationships between attribution styles and between support for punitive and rehabilitative crime policies. The findings reveal that using unidirectional sets of questions to measure these concepts likely results in 1) inflated alpha reliability coefficients, 2) an underestimation of the magnitude of the negative relationships between attribution styles and between punitiveness and support for rehabilitation, and 3) an underestimation of the extent to which punitiveness and support for rehabilitation are driven by the same factors, working in opposite directions.

4. Mark J. Brandt, Christine Reyna, To Love or Hate Thy Neighbor: The Role of Authoritarianism and Traditionalism in Explaining the Link Between Fundamentalism and Racial Prejudice, Political Psychology, 2014, 35, 2

Fundamentalism is consistently related to racial prejudice (Hall, Matz, & Wood, 2010), yet the mechanisms for this relationship are unclear. We identify two core values of fundamentalism, authoritarianism and traditionalism, that independently contribute to the fundamentalism-racial prejudice relationship. We also contextualize the fundamentalism-racial prejudice relationship by suggesting that fundamentalists may show prejudice based on conceptions of African Americans as violating values but show tolerance when prejudice is less justifiable. These ideas are tested and confirmed using three data sets from the American National Election Studies. Across all three samples, fundamentalism is related to increases in symbolic racism but decreases in negative affect towards African Americans, and these relationships are mediated by both authoritarianism and traditionalism.

5. Joy E. Phillips, Michael A. Olson, When Implicitly and Explicitly Measured Racial Attitudes Align: The Roles of Social Desirability and Thoughtful Responding, Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 2014, 36, 2, 125

Using reasoning derived from the MODE model of attitude-behavior relations (Olson & Fazio, 2009), two experiments investigated the roles different instructional sets play in the relationship between implicit and explicit measures of racial prejudice. In Experiment 1, participants implored to be honest evidenced greater correspondence between an Implicit Association Test and explicit measures of prejudice, suggesting that motivation to do other than what one's automatic response to an object implies reduces implicit–explicit correspondence. Findings from Experiment 2 suggest that it is a general motive to think carefully about one's explicit responses, and not social desirability concerns, that reduces the correspondence between implicit and explicit measures of prejudice.

6. Toon Kuppens, Russell Spears, You don’t have to be well-educated to be an aversive racist, but it helps, Social Science Research, 2014, 45, 211

People with higher levels of formal education report less prejudice in survey research. Here we present novel evidence on the nature of educational differences in anti-Black attitudes among Whites. We replicate the education effect on explicit self-report measures of anti-Black attitudes, but we find that education is much less related to implicit measures of anti-Black attitudes. Implicit measures differ from explicit measures in that they do not allow respondents to control the measurement outcome; they therefore measure more spontaneous aspects of attitudes. These results shed new light on intergroup attitudes of the higher educated. Higher educated people are more likely to be aversive racists, that is, to score low on explicit, but not implicit measures of prejudice. Given the differential relation of explicit versus implicit measures to behavior, they have wide-ranging implications for the kind of intergroup behavior and discrimination we can expect from less and more highly educated people.

7. Benjamin R. Knoll, Jordan Shewmaker, “Simply un-American”: Nativism and Support for Health Care Reform, Political Behavior, 2013,

This study investigates the relationship between individual-level support for the 2010 Affordable Care Act and nativism, the perception that a traditional American culture and way of life needs to be protected against foreign influence. The results of an analysis of a 2011 public opinion survey demonstrate that nativism was an independent and significant predictor of opposition to health care reform and that this effect held for both Republicans as well as Democrats, although the relationship is stronger for Republicans. This is substantively important for two reasons. First, it demonstrates that certain sub-groups of the American public evaluate public policy proposals on the basis of their perceived “foreignness.” Second, it demonstrates that while nativism is traditionally associated with immigration and other race/ethnic-based policy preferences, it also affects attitudes toward other seemingly race-neutral policies in the United States.

8. Angie Maxwell, T. Wayne Parent, A “Subterranean Agenda”? Racial Attitudes, Presidential Evaluations, and Tea Party Membership, Race and Social Problems, 2013, 5, 3, 226

Recent research suggests that fiscally conservative policy preferences and disapproval of President Obama are significant predictors of Tea Party membership (Maxwell and Parent 2012). Unfortunately, however, we know very little about the reasons why Tea Party members so aggressively disapprove of President Obama. While Tea Party members adamantly deny that President Obama’s race plays any role in their motivations, their critics argue that racial attitudes are a primary reason why individuals choose to join the movement. In this article, using national survey data conducted by Knowledge Networks (n = 1649), we explore the possibility that three unique racial attitudes have been influential in the establishment of the Tea Party. Specifically, we investigate the role of symbolic racism, racial stereotypes, and ethnocentrism as predictors of self-identified Tea Party membership among whites.

9. Benjamin R. Knoll, Assessing the effect of social desirability on nativism attitude responses, Social Science Research, 2013, 42, 6, 1587

Attempts to measure and analyze public opinion attitudes toward racial/ethnic minorities often confront the “social desirability” problem: those who have prejudiced attitudes are rarely willing to admit them to surveyors. Instead, they may be more likely to give a socially acceptable answer rather an accurate reflection of their views. Previous research has clearly established that this effect presents a challenge for accurately measuring self-reported racial and policy attitudes that primarily affect African-Americans. It is less clear, however, how it might affect self-reported responses to attitudes dealing with Latinos and immigration. This study thus seeks to analyze the extent to which social desirability may affect survey measures of perceived levels of cultural threat (nativism). Results from two separate analyses using the Crowne-Marlowe “social desirability scale” and a survey “list experiment” demonstrate that social desirability is indeed a concern for accurately measuring nativism in the American public, but that it exerts an opposite effect from what has previously been observed: nativist attitudes tend to be over-reported in opinion surveys.

10. Markus Kemmelmeier, H. Lyssette Chavez, Biases in the Perception of Barack Obama's Skin Tone, Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, 2013, 13, 1

White Americans higher in prejudice were less likely to vote for Barack Obama than other Americans. Recent research also demonstrated that supporters and opponents of Mr. Obama engaged in skin tone biases, i.e., they perceive Mr. Obama's skin tone as lighter or darker in line with more positive or negative views of him. Across two studies we hypothesized that skin tone biases occur as a function of two independent sources: racial prejudice, which is always related to skin tone bias, and political partisanship, which is related to skin tone bias primarily during elections. Study 1 assessed perceptions of Mr. Obama's skin tone shortly before and after the 2008 Presidential election, and shortly after the first inauguration. Study 2 assessed perceptions in the middle of his first term, immediately prior to the 2012 Presidential election, and 1 year into his second term in office. Consistent with our hypothesis, we found that partisan skin tone bias was limited to the election period, whereas prejudice-based skin tone biases occurred independent from any election.

11. Justin M. Smith, Mary Senter, J. Cherie Strachan, Gender and White College Students' Racial Attitudes, Sociological Inquiry, 2013, 83, 4

New forms of racial attitudes among whites, including racial resentment, help to uphold institutionalized inequalities in the United States. As a way to dismantle institutionalized forms of racial inequalities, colleges and universities have implemented various curricula and programs designed to expose students to diversity and reduce social inequalities. This study attempts to uncover the extent to which college experiences affect levels of racial resentment among white students, with emphasis on whether the effects differ for women and men. Findings from a representative sample of students at a large Midwestern university revealed that white men showed higher levels of racial resentment than white women and that their attitudes were significantly affected by many college experiences. By contrast, white women are less affected by aspects of their college experience.

12. Benjamin R. Knoll, Implicit Nativist Attitudes, Social Desirability, and Immigration Policy P, International Migration Review, 2013, 47, 1

While previous research on immigration attitudes among the American public has focused on factors such as economic threat, social context, and racial prejudice, fewer studies have examined the psychological determinants of immigration policy preferences. This study analyzes the results of an implicit association test (IAT) procedure which measures automatic nativist preferences for traditional American culture verses Latino-American culture (i.e. implicit nativist attitudes). In brief, this study demonstrates that implicit nativist attitudes are fairly common, that they are an independent predictor of immigration policy attitudes, and that they affect those who are not explicitly nativist but who still hold restrictionist policy views.

13. M. A. C. D'Ancona, Measuring xenophobia: Social desirability and survey mode effects, Migration Studies, 2013,

The literature on sensitive questions shows that the survey mode affects the answers obtained. This acquires special relevance when measuring racism and xenophobia. This article offers the results of a quasi-experimental survey comparing three survey modes: 1) the conventional face-to-face survey; 2) a modified face-to-face condition where respondents answered a subset of questions in a self-administered form; 3) a completely non-interviewer condition where questionnaires were first handed out for the interviewees to fill in on their own, and collected on another agreed date. Consistent with our hypothesis, some support for the social desirability bias and survey mode effects was obtained. Self-administration of questionnaires encouraged declarations of xenophobia, but more so when subtle or indirect scales of rejection versus acceptance of immigrants were used. The drawback was the under-representation of respondents with a low level of education in self-administered methods. Contrary to our expectations, less educated respondents were affected by the survey mode.

14. Philip J. Osteen, Todd J. Vanidestine, Tanya L. Sharpe, Multicultural Curriculum and MSW Students' Attitudes about Race and Diversity, Journal of Teaching in Social Work, 2013, 33, 2, 111

Methods of incorporating culturally competent practice and social justice curricula often are addressed in a required course or across courses using an infusion model. This research explored multicultural curricula and MSW students' attitudes about race and diversity. Data were collected from 297 MSW students enrolled at two universities. Multivariate analysis of variance revealed significant differences between students in programs with required multicultural coursework and those utilizing an infusion model, with respect to attitudes toward African Americans but not on measures of diversity or social equality and justice. The results indicate the differential outcomes based on curriculum models and support the need for further research in this area.

15. Daniel N. Jones, Psychopathy and machiavellianism predict differences in racially motivated attitudes and their affiliations, Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 2013, 43,

Different forms of racism and racist groups should be differentially attractive to politically motivated members of the Dark Triad. Study 1 showed that high levels of both Machiavellianism and right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) predicted modern racism, whereas high levels of psychopathy and RWA predicted old-fashioned racism. In Study 2, those high in Machiavellianism and RWA wanted to join a traditional Ku Klux Klan (KKK) group, emphasizing nonviolence and political strategies. However, those high in psychopathy and RWA wanted to join a violent, Neo-Nazi militia group. The studies highlight differences between Machiavellianism and psychopathy in expression of antisocial tendencies and dispositions. In addition, when combined with RWA endorsement, these traits can lead to the support of destructive organizations.

16. Rui Costa-Lopes, John F. Dovidio, Cícero Roberto Pereira, John T. Jost, Social psychological perspectives on the legitimation of social inequality: Past, present and future, European Journal of Social Psychology, 2013, 43, 4

This introductory article for the special issue entitled “Social Psychological Perspectives on the Legitimation of Social Inequality” reviews various theoretical frameworks applied to the study of this topic. Legitimation of social inequality occurs through individual-level, group-level, and system-level processes. In societies in which egalitarianism and fairness are core cultural values, legitimation permits differential treatment of people on the basis of their social group memberships while allowing people to maintain positive self-images, to reinforce group-based hierarchies and to justify a status quo that systematically benefits some individuals and groups more than others. In this article, we focus on three major theoretical perspectives in social psychology that have inspired most of the research featured in this special issue, and we offer a general overview of the articles to follow, expanding upon their connections to one another and to the theme of the issue. We highlight the promise of research on legitimation of social inequality not only for developing a deeper and more integrative theoretical understanding of intergroup relations but also for guiding interventions to achieve social equality in practice.

17. Michael S. North, Susan T. Fiske, Subtyping Ageism: Policy Issues in Succession and Consumption, Social Issues and Policy Review, 2013, 7, 1

Ageism research tends to lump “older people” together as one group, as do policy matters that conceptualize everyone over-65 as “senior.” This approach is problematic primarily because it often fails to represent accurately a rapidly growing, diverse, and healthy older population. In light of this, we review the ageism literature, emphasizing the importance of distinguishing between the still-active “young-old” and the potentially more impaired “old-old” (Neugarten, 1974). We argue that ageism theory has disproportionately focused on the old-old and differentiate the forms of age discrimination that apparently target each elder subgroup. In particular, we highlight the young-old’s plights predominantly in the workplace and tensions concerning succession of desirable resources; by contrast, old-old predicaments likely center on consumption of shared resources outside of the workplace. For both social psychological researchers and policymakers, accurately subtyping ageism will help society best accommodate a burgeoning, diverse older population.

18. Evelyn M. Maeder, Joel Burdett, The Combined Effect of Defendant Race and Alleged Gang Affiliation on Mock Juror Decision-Making, Psychiatry, Psychology and Law, 2013, 20, 2, 188

Previous research has investigated the influence of several defendant characteristics on mock juror decision-making, but to date, no published research has examined the effect of a defendant's alleged gang membership on verdict decisions. The current study sought to investigate this effect, as well as how it might interact with the defendant's race. One hundred and five participants read a trial transcript involving a robbery case, in which the defendant was depicted as White, Black, or Aboriginal Canadian. In half of the transcripts, the arresting officer testified that the defendant was a known member of a gang. Results demonstrated that in general, participants judged the defendant more harshly when he was a gang member, but only when he was Black. When the defendant was depicted as White, no differences emerged as a function of alleged gang membership. Most interestingly, when the defendant was Aboriginal Canadian, participants treated him less harshly when he was an alleged gang member than when no such allegation was made.

19. Angie Maxwell, Pearl Ford Dowe, Todd Shields, The Next Link in the Chain Reaction: Symbolic Racism and Obama's Religious Affiliation, Social Science Quarterly, 2013, 94, 2

During the 2008 presidential election, questions about Barack Obama's religious affiliations spread rapidly over the Internet and became a regular story in the national news. Despite Obama's repeated testimony that he is a Christian, surveys indicated that a sizeable portion of the public believed that he was a Muslim, while others indicated that they were “unsure” of his religious allegiances. We evaluate the extent to which racial attitudes played a role in how the public viewed Obama's religious affiliations. We used nationally representative surveys conducted by the Pew Foundation and a state-level survey conducted in Arkansas. Our findings suggest that attitudes about Obama's religious affiliation were significantly influenced by symbolic racism. These findings suggest that the American public dialogue about racial politics has evolved in recent years to include religious denominations.

20. Jillian C. Banfield, John F. Dovidio, Whites' perceptions of discrimination against Blacks: The influence of common identity, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2013, 49, 5, 833

The present research, consisting of three experiments, examined how different ways of representing the group identities of White and Black Americans affect Whites' recognition of discrimination against a Black person and their willingness to protest on behalf of that person. In Experiment 1 we predicted and found that inducing a common-group representation (as Americans), compared to a condition that emphasized separate racial-group identities, reduced Whites' recognition of subtle discrimination. This pattern was reversed under external threat. In Experiment 2, common identity reduced recognition of discrimination that was subtle, but not blatant. In addition, although a common-group identity did not facilitate Whites' willingness to protest blatant discrimination in Experiments 2 and 3, in Experiment 3 inducing a dual identity, which emphasizes both subgroup differences and a common-group representation, did. We discuss the implications of the results for when common- and dual-identity representations foster action on behalf of a minority group.

21. Christopher D. DeSante, Working Twice as Hard to Get Half as Far: Race, Work Ethic, and America’s Deserving Poor, American Journal of Political Science, 2013, 57, 2

Attitudes toward racialized and redistributive policies like welfare are often thought of as a function of both principled ideological positions and the underlying racial attitudes a person holds. Kinder and Sanders (1996) look at racial resentment as one explanation, while Sniderman and his colleagues look to principled conservatism and authoritarianism as viable alternatives, claiming that racial resentment is merely proxying a legitimate race-neutral commitment to equality of opportunity. This article engages this debate through an experimental design which tests whether “hard work” is rewarded in a color-blind manner. The experimental design also affords scholars the opportunity to separate the effects of the two components of racial resentment: principled values and racial animus. The results show that American norms and implicit racism serve to uniquely privilege whites in a variety of ways.

22. Silvia Moscoso, Antonio L. Garcia-Izquierdo, Maria Bastida, A Mediation Model of Individual Differences in Attitudes Toward Affirmative Actions for Women^1,2, Psychological Reports, 2012, 110, 3, 764

A mediation model of the relation between gender and attitudes toward affirmative action in favor of working women was tested. Four mediation variables were considered: perceived unfairness in the situation of working women, perceived threat to the non-designated group (men), self-esteem, and gender self-concept (masculinity and femininity). 192 women and 128 men, with differing occupations, participated. Gender affects individuals' attitudes toward affirmative actions for women, mediated by perceived unfairness in the situation of working women, perceived threat to the non-designated group, and feminine self-concept. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

23. Susan R. Torres-Harding, Brian Siers, Bradley D. Olson, Development and Psychometric Evaluation of the Social Justice Scale (SJS), American Journal of Community Psychology, 2012, 50, 1-2, 77

The study describes the development of the Social Justice Scale (SJS). Practitioners, educators, students, and other members of the community differ on their attitudes and values regarding social justice. It is important to assess, not only individuals’ attitudes and values around social values, but also other constructs that might be related to social justice behaviors. The implication of Ajzen in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 50:179–211, (1991) theory of planned behavior suggests that attitudes, perceived behavioral control, and social norms predict intentions, which then lead to behaviors. A scale was designed to measure social justice-related values, attitudes, perceived behavioral control, subjective norms, and intentions based on a four-factor conception of Ajzen’s theory. Confirmatory factor analysis and analyses for reliability and validity were used to test the properties of the scale.

24. J. Rosie Tighe, How Race and Class Stereotyping Shapes Attitudes Toward Affordable Housing, Housing Studies, 2012, 27, 7, 962

The development of affordable housing often involves a contentious siting process. Proposed housing developments frequently trigger concern among neighbors and community groups about potential negative impacts on neighborhood quality of life and property values. Advocates, developers, and researchers have long suspected that these concerns stem in part from racial or class prejudice. Yet, to date, empirical evidence supporting these assumptions is lacking. This study seeks to examine roles that perceptions of race and class play in shaping opinions that underlie public opposition to affordable housing. This study applies a public opinion survey to determine the extent to which stereotypes and perceptions of the poor and minorities relate to attitudes toward affordable housing. The results demonstrate that such perceptions are particularly strong determinants of negative attitudes about affordable housing. These findings provide advocates, planners, developers, and researchers with a more accurate portrayal of affordable housing opposition, thereby allowing the response to be shaped in a more appropriate manner.

25. Michael Inzlicht, Jennifer N. Gutsell, Lisa Legault, Mimicry reduces racial prejudice, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2012, 48, 1, 361

Humans are empathic animals. We automatically match other people's motor responses, allowing us to get “under the skin” of other people. Although this perception–action-coupling—a form of motor resonance—occurs spontaneously, this happens less readily with the outgroup (vs. the ingroup) and for those high (vs. low) in prejudice. Thus, prejudice diminishes our tendency to resonate with the outgroup. Here we suggest that the reverse is also possible—that resonating with the actions of an outgroup member can reduce prejudice. We predict, in other words, that explicitly mimicking the outgroup can reduce prejudice. Participants watched a 140-second video depicting actors repeatedly reaching for and drinking from a glass of water. They passively watched a video with Black actors; watched the video and mimicked the Black actors; or watched and mimicked a video with actors from their ingroup. Participants then completed the Affect Misattribution Procedure ( Payne, Cheng, Govorun, & Stewart, 2005), a measure of implicit anti-Black prejudice, and an explicit symbolic racism measure. Results indicate that the outgroup-mimicry group had similar implicit preference for Blacks and Whites, unlike the other two groups, which preferred Whites over Blacks. The outgroup-mimicry group also reported less explicit racism towards Blacks than the ingroup-mimicry group, but no less than the ingroup-observation group. Mimicking specific outgroup members, therefore, reduces implicit, and possibly explicit, bias against the outgroup more generally.

26. Young Min Baek, Angela M. Lee, Minority comparison model: Effects of Whites’ multiracial evaluation on symbolic racism and racialized policy p, The Social Science Journal, 2012, 49, 2, 127

Most Racial Studies primarily focus on African Americans without paying attention to nonblack minorities, and it fails to capture recent increase in racial diversity. Based on previous theories and empirical findings, we propose a new model, minority comparison model, which accounts for theoretical shortcomings in Racial Studies. This model (1) captures psychological processes that compare blacks and nonblacks, and (2) explores the effects of whites’ multiracial evaluation on racialized policy preferences. Drawing on a 2008 national representative sample, this study finds that whites who have positive stereotype of nonblacks (e.g., Hispanics and/or Asians) but negative stereotype of blacks show substantially higher symbolic racism and stronger opposition to Affirmative Action, whereas whites who have positive stereotype of blacks but negative stereotypes of nonblacks have stronger opposition to expansive immigration policy. Our study offers new ways of understanding and accounting for symbolic racism in modern context, and shows how whites’ preferences in racialized policies are influenced by multiracial evaluation.

27. GUY A. BOYSEN, Teachers' Responses to Bias in the Classroom: How Response Type and Situational Factors Affect Student Perceptions, Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 2012, 42, 2

College students frequently encounter prejudice, discrimination, and stereotypes, but there is no research on effective teacher responses to classroom bias. Three studies examined students' perceptions of teacher responses to bias in the classroom. Study 1 experimentally manipulated the level of bias expressed and the teacher's response. Students perceived responding to bias as more effective than ignoring bias. Study 2 demonstrated that students perceive differences in the intensity of common responses to bias. Study 3 manipulated if bias occurred publicly or privately and if the target of bias was present or not, and students evaluated teacher responses of differing intensity for their effectiveness in achieving specific goals. The results provide evidence for the efficacy of matching responses to specific goals.

28. Mark J. Brandt, Christine Reyna, The Functions of Symbolic Racism, Social Justice Research, 2012, 25, 1, 41

Symbolic racism (SR) has attracted critique and controversy. One controversy that has remained unresolved is the function of SR. SR theorists suggest that SR originates from Black individualism and represents a new form of racism. Others suggest that SR originates in opposition to equality and serves to legitimize these socially inappropriate attitudes. The current paper argues that SR can arise from both Black individualism and anti-equality attitudes, thus serving both as a new expression of racism but also as a legitimizing ideology. A preliminary test of this hybrid model was examined with survey data from a community and university sample. Results suggest that a hybrid model of the underpinnings of SR explains more variance in SR than either the Black individualism or legitimizing ideology models. Furthermore, SR mediated the relationships between both anti-equality attitudes and Black individualism on opposition to affirmative action policy and diversity in work and education settings.

29. Lisa Legault, Isabelle Green-Demers, The protective role of self-determined prejudice regulation in the relationship between intergroup threat and prejudice, Motivation and Emotion, 2012, 36, 2, 143

Although plenty of evidence supports the link between intergroup threat and prejudice, few intrapersonal moderators of this association have been investigated. One potentially important moderator is the source of motivation underlying prejudice regulation. In Study 1, we examined whether self-determined prejudice regulation reduces the impact of intergroup threat on various outgroup attitude variables (e.g., modern racism, outgroup affect, etc.). Results suggest that being self-determined in one’s motivation to regulate prejudice buffers the impact of intergroup threat on prejudice, whereas regulating prejudice primarily for non-self-determined reasons serves to exacerbate the threat-prejudice effect. In Study 2, a cross-sectional corroboration of this interaction was obtained using structural equation modeling, revealing that the threat-prejudice link differed significantly across groups of prejudice regulators. The role of self-determination in reducing the harmful effects of intergroup threat is discussed, and implications for prejudice reduction and diversity education are identified.

30. Elena V. Stepanova, Michael J Strube, The role of skin color and facial physiognomy in racial categorization: Moderation by implicit racial attitudes, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2012, 48, 4, 867

Previous research has not sufficiently addressed factors that define and moderate racial categorization judgments. This study independently manipulated skin color and facial physiognomy to determine their relative weighting in racial categorization. Participants (N = 250) judged faces varying on 10 levels of facial physiognomy (from Afrocentric to Eurocentric) and 10 levels of skin color (from dark to light) under either no time constraints, a modest time constraint, and under a stringent time constraint. Skin color was a powerful predictor of racial typicality ratings at all levels of facial physiognomy, but participants relied upon facial physiognomy more when rating faces of light than dark skin color. Skin color was a more important cue than facial physiognomy under no time constraints, but as time constraints became more severe, skin color's importance decreased, yet it remained a more important cue at extreme physiognomy levels. The relationship between skin color and racial typicality ratings was stronger for those with more negative implicit racial attitudes. These findings suggest the primary role of skin color in racial categorization and underscore the importance of implicit attitudes in explicit categorization judgments.

31. Julie L. Davies, Oliver H. Turnbull, Affective bias in complex decision making: Modulating sensitivity to aversive feedback, Motivation and Emotion, 2011, 35, 2, 235

The present study investigated the conﬂictbetween well-developed attitudes and incentive rewardsusing the Iowa Gambling Task. In particular, the incorpo-ration of emotional labels allowed us to model the role of affective biases and their impact on complex decisionmaking over time. Two experiments manipulated the class of deck label (emotional pictures and racial faces) using both congruent and incongruent association to the deck incentives. Both experiments demonstrated that an incon-gruent association can lead to striking and persistentdecision making biases. Thus, a common theme was ageneral inability to tolerate conﬂict between rewards and goal-irrelevant labels. Notably, Experiment 2 demonstrated that this ‘incongruency’ effect appeared to result frompositive labels interfering with aversive experiences frombad decks. More generally, sensitivity to accumulatinglosses from punishing decks was primarily associated withsuccessful performance on these Gambling Task variants.These results suggest emotional biases are readily harmfulin complex decision making, and that ﬂexibility in theextent to which we permit emotional inﬂuences to guideour decisions is crucial.

32. Eric Hehman, Samuel L. Gaertner, John F. Dovidio, Evaluations of presidential performance: Race, prejudice, and perceptions of Americanism, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2011, 47, 2, 430

Earlier research suggests that despite President Obama's election, racial prejudice persists and continues to shape reactions to his presidency. The current work examines the role of Whites’ prejudice in shaping perceptions of Obama's Americanism, and ultimately evaluations of his performance. Specifically, this research proposes that “how American” Obama is perceived will mediate the relationship between racial prejudice and evaluations of his performance for White, but not Black participants and only for Obama and not for Vice-President Biden. Data were collected from 295 Black or White students surveyed 1 year after Obama's election. Supportive of our hypotheses, racial prejudice predicted Whites’ negative evaluations of Obama's performance, and this relationship was mediated by how American Obama was perceived. Additionally, these relationships were not obtained among Black participants or when Blacks or Whites evaluated the Americanism and job performance of Vice-President Biden.

33. Anastasia Gorodzeisky, Focus groups as a tool in the construction of questionnaires: the case of discriminatory attitudes, Quality & Quantity, 2011, 45, 6, 1217

The aim of the present article is twofold First, it tests and demonstrates the supplementary use of focus groups to construct quantitatively oriented survey on anti-minority sentiment. Second, it clarifies two major theoretical concepts-prejudice versus perceived threat-in the research on discriminatory attitudes towards minority populations. More specifically, by using data from focus group discussions on foreign workers in Israel, the study examines the use of such groups for measurement of prejudice and perceived threat within the social and cultural context of Israeli society. The analysis of focus group discussions provides adapted questionnaire scales for measuring prejudice and perceived threat. The findings support the premise that prejudice and perceived threat are two distinct theoretical concepts.

34. Sergi Pardos-Prado, Framing Attitudes Towards Immigrants in Europe: When Competition Does Not Matter, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2011, 37, 7, 999

The socio-economic conditions of native populations and axioms derived from ethnic competition theory have often been used to account for xenophobic attitudes. By contrast, much less research has been conducted on the impact of ideological structures on the formation of attitudes towards immigration. This paper aims to fill this gap by suggesting that broad ideological structures in terms of left–right self-placements are important cognitive determinants of attitudes towards migrants when the direct experience of competition for scarce resources is lower. It shows that political preferences structure attitudes when the socio-economic vulnerability of citizens and geographical contexts are low enough for migrants not to be framed as a direct threat. Economic vulnerability is thus theorised to overcome the resistance of ideological predispositions. The findings are obtained through hierarchical linear models using the 2002–03 European Social Survey.

35. Benjamin R. Knoll, David P. Redlawsk, Howard Sanborn, Framing Labels and Immigration Policy Attitudes in the Iowa Caucuses: “Trying to Out-Tancredo Tancredo”, Political Behavior, 2011, 33, 3, 433

We use an experiment built into a series of surveys of Iowa voters during the 2008 Iowa Caucus campaign to test the effect of differing group framing labels on immigration policy preferences. We find that certain framing labels matter, but only among Republican partisans for whom the immigration issue is important. We also find that issue importance produces more conservative policy preferences for Democrats as well as Republicans. We examine and discuss these results as well as their implications for the immigration debate, the interaction between issue salience and policy preferences, and the theory of political framing in general.

36. D. A. Stanley, P. Sokol-Hessner, M. R. Banaji, E. A. Phelps, Implicit race attitudes predict trustworthiness judgments and economic trust decisions, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2011, 108, 19, 7710

Trust lies at the heart of every social interaction. Each day we face decisions in which we must accurately assess another individual's trustworthiness or risk suffering very real consequences. In a global marketplace of increasing heterogeneity with respect to nationality, race, and multiple other social categories, it is of great value to understand how implicitly held attitudes about group membership may support or undermine social trust and thereby implicitly shape the decisions we make. Recent behavioral and neuroimaging work suggests that a common mechanism may underlie the expression of implicit race bias and evaluations of trustworthiness, although no direct evidence of a connection exists. In two behavioral studies, we investigated the relationship between implicit race attitude (as measured by the Implicit Association Test) and social trust. We demonstrate that race disparity in both an individual's explicit evaluations of trustworthiness and, more crucially, his or her economic decisions to trust is predicted by that person's bias in implicit race attitude. Importantly, this relationship is robust and is independent of the individual's bias in explicit race attitude. These data demonstrate that the extent to which an individual invests in and trusts others with different racial backgrounds is related to the magnitude of that individual's implicit race bias. The core dimension of social trust can be shaped, to some degree, by attitudes that reside outside conscious awareness and intention.

37. Kirby Goidel, Wayne Parent, Bob Mann, Race, Racial Resentment, Attentiveness to the News Media, and Public Opinion Toward the Jena Six, Social Science Quarterly, 2011, 92, 1

We outline the role of race, racial resentment, and attentiveness to news in structuring public opinion toward the prosecution of the Jena Six, the name given to six African-American high school students who beat a white student, five of whom were subsequently charged with attempted second-degree murder. We rely on a telephone survey of 428 registered voters collected in the aftermath of the protests in Jena, Louisiana. Public reactions were heavily filtered by race and associated with measures of racial resentment. African Americans followed news about the protests more closely, believed race was the most important consideration in the decision to prosecute, and believed the decision to prosecute was the wrong decision. Racially conservative white respondents were less likely to believe race was the most important consideration in the decision to prosecute and were more likely to believe that the decision to prosecute was the right decision. Consistent with theories of agenda setting and framing, attentiveness to the news influenced perceptions regarding the importance of race in the decision to prosecute but not whether the decision was the right decision. At least within the context of the Deep South, race and racial attitudes continue to be an important predictor of public reactions to racially charged events. Attentiveness to the news influenced the lens through which events were interpreted, but not perceptions of whether the outcome was the right decision.

38. Jill E. Lybarger, Margo J. Monteith, The effect of Obama saliency on individual-level racial bias: Silver bullet or smokescreen?, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2011, 47, 3, 647

President Obama's election has been construed as a potentially positive force for intergroup relations, but this issue has not been previously addressed experimentally. In experiment 1, conducted 4–5months after the election, White participants were primed with either President Obama or nature before completing a variety of race-related measures. Results indicated that priming Obama did not influence implicit racial bias or internal motivation to control prejudice. However, consistent with exemplar and symbolic racism theories, participants primed with President Obama expressed greater agreement with the tenets of symbolic racism and were more reluctant to accept the possibility that they personally harbored subtle racial bias. Experiment 2, conducted 21months after the election, replicated the Obama effects from experiment 1 and showed that priming another Black exemplar (Oprah) also increased symbolic racism. Results suggest that highly successful Black exemplars currently serve as a smokescreen for symbolic and subtle racial biases.

39. Serena Does, Belle Derks, Naomi Ellemers, Thou shalt not discriminate: How emphasizing moral ideals rather than obligations increases Whites' support for social equality, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2011, 47, 3, 562

An important step toward reducing group-based disparities in society is creating support for equality among advantaged group members (e.g., Whites and men). The current research examined how presenting social equality between ethnic groups in terms of moral ideals (i.e., equal treatment) vs. moral obligations (i.e., non-discrimination) affected the attitudes of Whites (students in Study 1, N=45 and 2, N=44 and employees in Study 3a, N=67 and Study 3b, N=62) toward various social equality issues. It was found that participants in the moral ideals condition reported more activation rather than inhibition tendencies regarding equality (Study 1), were more supportive of affirmative action (Study 2), indicated lower levels of social identity threat, and were more favorable toward cultural diversity which resulted in greater prioritization of equality (Study 3a) than those in the moral obligation condition. These effects did not arise when the ideals/obligations distinction was applied to a nonmoral domain (i.e., competence, Study 3b), underlining the central argument that these processes are specific to morality. The broader theoretical implications for morality and intergroup research are discussed.

40. Harold D. Clarke, Allan Kornberg, Thomas J. Scotto, Jason Reifler, David Sanders, Marianne C. Stewart, Paul Whiteley, Yes we can! Valence politics and electoral choice in America, 2008, Electoral Studies, 2011, 30, 3, 450

The claim that the 2008 presidential election was a transformative one is fast becoming part of the conventional wisdom of American politics. Despite the election’s undoubted significance, this paper argues that factors affecting voting decisions were strikingly similar to those operating in many previous presidential elections. Using data from the CCAP six-wave national election survey, we demonstrate that a valence politics model provides a powerful, parsimonious explanation of the ballot decisions Americans made in 2008. As is typical in presidential elections, candidate images had major effects on electoral choice. Controlling for several other relevant factors, racial attitudes were strongly associated with how voters reacted to the candidates. Other models of electoral choice, such as a Downsian issue-proximity model, are also relevant, but their explanatory power is considerably less than that provided by the valence politics model.

41. Florian Arendt, Cultivation Effects of a Newspaper on Reality Estimates and Explicit and Implicit Attitudes, Journal of Media Psychology: Theories, Methods, and Applications, 2010, 22, 4, 147

This paper explores the cultivation effect of a newspaper on its readers’ reality estimates and attitudes. Additionally, the study tries to advance cultivation research by examining implicit attitudes (i.e., automatic affective reactions toward an object). A content analysis of four months of news coverage in one particular newspaper showed that foreigners were overrepresented as offenders and that the newspaper had a negative view of the EU. According to cultivation theory, it is assumed that the more people read a newspaper, the more their reality estimates and attitudes correspond to the most recurrent, stable, and overarching patterns of the newspaper’s content. To test this hypothesis, a total of 453 students participated in a study that used a cross-lagged panel design with two waves and a time-lag of two months. Consistent with the cultivation hypothesis, those who spent more time reading the newspaper were more likely to overestimate the frequency of foreigners as offenders (i.e., first-order cultivation) and had more negative self-reported attitudes toward the EU (i.e., second-order cultivation). Additionally, those who read more of the newspaper showed more negative implicit attitudes toward the EU (i.e., implicit cultivation). The data show evidence of a significant causal influence of newspaper exposure on implicit attitudes, and a marginally significant causal effect on the overestimation of foreigners as offenders and on explicit attitudes toward the EU. The consideration of implicit attitudes as an additional dependent variable could advance cultivation theory and research.

42. Jennifer N. Gutsell, Michael Inzlicht, Empathy constrained: Prejudice predicts reduced mental simulation of actions during observation of outgroups, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2010, 46, 5, 841

Empathy facilitates prosocial behavior and social understanding. Here, however, we suggest that the most basic mechanism of empathy—the intuitive sharing of other’s emotional and motivational states—is limited to those we like. Measuring electroencephalographic (EEG) alpha oscillations as people observed ingroup vs outgroup members, we found that participants showed similar activation patterns when feeling sad as when they observed ingroup members feeling sad. In contrast, participants did not show these same activation patterns when observing outgroup members and even less so the more they were prejudiced. These findings provide evidence from brain activity for an ingroup bias in empathy: empathy may be restricted to close others and, without active effort, may not extend to outgroups, potentially making them likely targets for prejudice and discrimination.

43. Matthew B. Kugler, Joel Cooper, Brian A. Nosek, Group-Based Dominance and Opposition to Equality Correspond to Different Psychological Motives, Social Justice Research, 2010, 23, 2-3, 117

Social Dominance Orientation, one of the most popular individual differences measures in the study of generalized prejudice, can be understood as having two components: Opposition to Equality (OEQ) and support for Group-Based Dominance (GBD). We consider these components in terms of system justification theory and social identity theory. We find that each component best explains different kinds of political views, consistent with the theory that they arise from different motivations. OEQ reflects system justification motives. It better predicts attitudes towards redistributive social policy, political conservatism, and a lack of humanitarian compassion for the disadvantaged. GBD reflects social identity motives. It is more associated with hostility toward outgroups and concerns about intergroup competition. GBD and OEQ have different personality and demographic correlates, exhibit distinctive relations with explicit and implicit attitudinal preferences, and differentially predict a variety of policy attitudes. Use of GBD and OEQ as separate constructs enriches the understanding of prejudice, policy attitudes, and political ideology.

44. Gary M. Segura, Ali A. Valenzuela, Hope, Tropes, and Dopes: Hispanic and White Racial Animus in the 2008 Election, Presidential Studies Quarterly, 2010, 40, 3

One of the central questions surrounding the 2008 presidential election is the role of race in shaping electoral choice among non-Hispanic whites, and whether race played an equivalent role among Hispanics, whose willingness to vote for an African American candidate was raised as an uncertainty during the primary campaign. The authors argue that, beyond the usual association of racial sentiment with party preference, the effect of Obama's race on the 2008 election is significant, but substantially smaller among Latinos than among non-Hispanic whites. Although Latino voters often express racial sentiments that are indistinguishable from whites, there was a significant disconnect between those racial sentiments and Latinos' vote choice and evaluations of candidate Obama. The authors explore the explanatory power of explicit, indirect, and implicit measures of racial sentiment and find that an indirect measurement—the Racial Resentment Index—retains the greatest predictive validity, notwithstanding its conceptual challenges.

45. Spencer Piston, How Explicit Racial Prejudice Hurt Obama in the 2008 Election, Political Behavior, 2010, 32, 4, 431

Some commentators claim that white Americans put prejudice behind them when evaluating presidential candidates in 2008. Previous research examining whether white racism hurts black candidates has yielded mixed results. Fortunately, the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama provides an opportunity to examine more rigorously whether prejudice disadvantages black candidates. I also make use of an innovation in the measurement of racial stereotypes in the 2008 American National Election Studies survey, which yields higher levels of reporting of racial stereotypes among white respondents. I find that negative stereotypes about blacks significantly eroded white support for Barack Obama. Further, racial stereotypes do not predict support for previous Democratic presidential candidates or current prominent Democrats, indicating that white voters punished Obama for his race rather than his party affiliation. Finally, prejudice had a particularly large impact on the voting decisions of Independents and a substantial impact on Democrats but very little influence on Republicans.

46. Julie L. Shulman, Joshua Glasgow, Is Race-Thinking Biological or Social, and Does It Matter for Racism? An Exploratory Study, Journal of Social Philosophy, 2010, 41, 3

The article presents a study which aims to analyze the connection between biological and social conceptions of race. The study made use of Quick Discrimination Index (QDI) and Henry and Sears Symbolic Racism 2000 (SR2K) scale in evaluating the racial attitudes of U.S. adults who completed an Internet survey. Results indicate the connection between racist attitudes and racial realism, although it suggests that racist attitudes have no difference in relation to various realist conceptions.

47. Alan S. Gerber, Gregory A. Huber, David Doherty, Conor M. Dowling, Shang E. Ha, Personality and Political Attitudes: Relationships across Issue Domains and Political Contexts, American Political Science Review, 2010, 104, 01, 111

Previous research on personality traits and political attitudes has largely focused on the direct relationships between traits and ideological self-placement. There are theoretical reasons, however, to suspect that the relationships between personality traits and political attitudes (1) vary across issue domains and (2) depend on contextual factors that affect the meaning of political stimuli. In this study, we provide an explicit theoretical framework for formulating hypotheses about these differential effects. We then leverage the power of an unusually large national survey of registered voters to examine how the relationships between Big Five personality traits and political attitudes differ across issue domains and social contexts (as defined by racial groups). We confirm some important previous findings regarding personality and political ideology, find clear evidence that Big Five traits affect economic and social attitudes differently, show that the effect of Big Five traits is often as large as that of education or income in predicting ideology, and demonstrate that the relationships between Big Five traits and ideology vary substantially between white and black respondents.

48. Christina Suthammanont, David A. M. Peterson, Chris T. Owens, Jan E. Leighley, Taking Threat Seriously: Prejudice, Principle, and Attitudes Toward Racial Policies, Political Behavior, 2010, 32, 2, 231

Drawing from group theories of race-related attitudes and electoral politics, we develop and test how anxiety influences the relative weight of prejudice as a determinant of individuals’ support for racial policies. We hypothesize that prejudice will more strongly influence the racial policy preferences of people who are feeling anxious than it will for people who are not. Using an experimental design we manipulate subjects’ levels of threat and find significant treatment effects, as hypothesized. We find that individuals’ racial policy attitudes are partially conditional on their affective states: individuals who feel anxious report less support for racial policies than those individuals who do not feel anxious, even when this threat is stimulated by non-racial content. More broadly, we conclude that affect is central to a better understanding of individuals’ political attitudes and behaviors.

49. Pearl K. Ford, Angie Maxwell, Todd Shields, What's the Matter with Arkansas? Symbolic Racism and 2008 Presidential Candidate Support, Presidential Studies Quarterly, 2010, 40, 2

The 2008 presidential election presented voters with the nation's first African American presidential candidate. Symbolic racism theory suggests that Obama's presence on the national ticket will activate a range of racial attitudes across the electorate. The authors examine two statewide surveys from Arkansas and Georgia in order to explore the importance of symbolic racism across different campaign contexts. The findings suggest that voting behavior was significantly influenced by symbolic racism. Consequently, the authors extend the symbolic racism literature by demonstrating the effects of these attitudes at the national level and across different campaign environments.

50. Jeffrey R. Huntsinger, Stacey Sinclair, When It Feels Right, Go With It: Affective Regulation of Affiliative Social Tuning, Social Cognition, 2010, 28, 3, 290

Past research demonstrates that when people are motivated to affiliate with another, their beliefs and implicit attitudes spontaneously adjust toward that person's apparent beliefs, a phenomenon dubbed affiliative social tuning. Two experiments examined the role of people's mood in regulating affiliative social tuning of implicit and explicit racial prejudice. Based on the idea that positive mood encourages and negative mood discourages pursuit of accessible goals, we predicted that when participants were in positive moods, interpersonal goals and the apparent beliefs of an interaction partner would interactively shape participants' racial prejudice. In contrast, when participants were in negative moods, interpersonal goals and the apparent beliefs of an interaction partner were not expected to impact racial prejudice. Results of two experiments supported these predictions. Other ways that mood may shape affiliative social tuning are discussed.

51. Tony N. Brown, Mark K. Akiyama, Ismail K. White, Toby Epstein Jayaratne, Elizabeth S. Anderson, Differentiating Contemporary Racial Prejudice from Old-Fashioned Racial Prejudice, Race and Social Problems, 2009, 1, 2, 97

The present study addresses the distinction between contemporary and old-fashioned prejudice using survey data from a national sample (n=600) of self-identified whites living in the United States and interviewed by telephone in 2001. First, we examine associations among indicators of contemporary and old-fashioned prejudice. Consistent with the literature, contemporary and old-fashioned prejudice indicators represent two distinct but correlated common factors. Second, we examine whether belief in genetic race differences uniformly predicts both types of prejudice. As might be expected, belief in genetic race differences predicts old-fashioned prejudice but contrary to recent theorizing, it also predicts contemporary prejudice.

52. Vassilis Saroglou, Bahija Lamkaddem, Matthieu Van Pachterbeke, Coralie Buxant, Host society's dislike of the Islamic veil: The role of subtle prejudice, values, and religion, International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 2009, 33, 5, 419

The wearing of the Islamic veil by Muslim women has become a source of tensions in Western European countries. In order to investigate majority members’ attitudes towards the veil, the present two studies (Ns = 166 and 147), carried out in Belgium, integrated three lines of research that have focused on (a) the role of subtle prejudice/racism on the host society's attitudes towards immigrants, (b) the role of values on acculturation, and (c) the role of religious attitudes on prejudice. Results revealed the effects of subtle prejudice/racism, values (self-enhancement values and security versus universalism), and religious attitudes (literal anti-religious thinking versus spirituality), in predicting greater levels of anti-veil attitudes beyond the effects of other related variables such as age and political conservatism. The studies also suggest the importance of including religious attitudes as part of the intergroup-relation factors that predict attitudes towards immigrants, at least with regard to specific components of intercultural relations.

53. Anthony G. Greenwald, Colin Tucker Smith, N. Sriram, Yoav Bar-Anan, Brian A. Nosek, Implicit Race Attitudes Predicted Vote in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election, Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, 2009, 9, 1

In the week before the 2008 United States presidential election, 1,057 registered voters reported their choice between the principal contenders (John McCain and Barack Obama) and completed several measures that might predict their candidate preference, including two implicit and two self-report measures of racial preference for European Americans (Whites) relative to African Americans (Blacks) and measures of symbolic racism and political conservatism. Greater White preference on each of the four race attitude measures predicted intention to vote for McCain, the White candidate. The implicit race attitude measures (Implicit Association Test and Affect Misattribution Procedure) predicted vote choice independently of the self-report race attitude measures, and also independently of political conservatism and symbolic racism. These findings support construct validity of the implicit measures.

54. Leonie Huddy, Stanley Feldman, On Assessing the Political Effects of Racial Prejudice, Annual Review of Political Science, 2009, 12, 1, 423

There is still no broad consensus on the extent to which racial prejudice influences white Americans' political attitudes, in part because of an ongoing dispute over the nature and measurement of racial prejudice. We review measures of new, subtle forms of racism toward African-Americans and consider criticism that such views do not clearly constitute racial prejudice despite their political impact. We then evaluate a number of ways in which explicit prejudice can be assessed in surveys, highlighting the continued existence and successful measurement of overt prejudice. We also consider ways to measure prejudice other than direct survey questions. Social psychologists have gravitated to the measurement of implicit racial attitudes, an approach that we review critically as potentially interesting but with unknown payoff for political researchers. Finally, we discuss the value of experiments as a way to gain direct evidence of politically potent racial discrimination and assess the prejudicial nature of explicit racial attitudes.

55. Christian Staerklé, Policy Attitudes, Ideological Values and Social Representations, Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2009, 3, 6

This article reviews research on policy attitudes and ideological values from the perspective of social representations theory. In the first part of the paper, key features of lay political thinking are presented, its pragmatic imperative, its focus on communication and the social functions of shared knowledge. Objectification transforms abstract and group-neutral ideological values into concrete and socially useful knowledge, in particular stereotypes of value-conforming and value-violating groups. Such shared understandings of intergroup relations provide citizens with common reference knowledge which provides the cognitive and cultural basis of policy attitudes. Social representations theory further suggests that lay knowledge reflects the social context in which it has been elaborated (anchoring), an aspect which allows conceptualising aggregate-level differences in policy attitudes. In the second part of the paper, a model of lay conceptions of social order is outlined which organises four shared conceptions of social order, along with the stereotype-based thinking associated with each conception: Moral order, Free Market, Social diversity and Structural inequality. We conclude by arguing that policy attitudes are symbolic devices expressed to justify or to challenge existing social arrangements.

56. P. J. Henry, David O. Sears, The Crystallization of Contemporary Racial Prejudice across the Lifespan, Political Psychology, 2009, 30, 4

The conventional wisdom is that racial prejudice remains largely stable through adulthood. However, very little is known about the development of contemporary racial attitudes like symbolic racism. The growing crystallization of symbolic racism through the lifespan is tested using two data sets that measure the stability, consistency, and predictive validity of symbolic racism in samples ranging in age from young adults to the elderly. The results provide evidence that the crystallization of symbolic racism generally takes on a curvilinear trajectory across the lifespan, showing that it is already largely crystallized by voting age, that it continues to crystallize still further through adulthood and that it begins to decline in coherence in late adulthood. The results generally provide evidence confirming early speculations of symbolic racism theorists concerning the crystallization of symbolic racism across the lifespan and are discussed in terms of different theoretical perspectives on the relationship between aging and attitudes more generally.

57. Michael A. Neblo, Three-Fifths a Racist: A Typology for Analyzing Public Opinion About Race, Political Behavior, 2009, 31, 1, 31

Is race politics primarily about symbolic racism, principled conservatism, or group conflict? After almost three decades, this debate among some of our best scholars seems scarcely closer to resolution, yet the theoretical, empirical, and normative issues at stake remain enormous. All three parties to the debate falsely assume that the causal structure driving opinion about race policy is homogenous. I reorient and advance the debate by showing how a methodological shift to a data-driven taxonomy of subjects can elucidate how race politics really is complex. I use this taxonomy to run new analyses, and to explain and assess the seemingly contradictory results of previous contributions to the debate. Each of the major parties to the debate is partially right in their account of public opinion about race politics, but about independently identifiable sub-sets of subjects.

58. Jeffrey D. Holmes, Transparency of Self-Report Racial Attitude Scales, Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 2009, 31, 2, 95

Researchers frequently use self-report prejudice scales to assess predictors and outcomes. Responding to evidence that such instruments are vulnerable to social desirability pressures and diverge from implicit attitude measures, researchers have developed instruments intended to be less transparent in their social implications. The purpose of this study was to assess the transparency of a sample of such instruments. Participants completed prejudice measures under typical scale instructions, or under alternate instructions to portray themselves either positively or negatively. The results indicate that several common measures of prejudice are quite transparent in their implications. Further, mean scores of participants instructed to provide desirable responses were indistinguishable from those ostensibly responding honestly.

59. Joshua L. Rabinowitz, David O. Sears, Jim Sidanius, Jon A. Krosnick, Why Do White Americans Oppose Race-Targeted Policies? Clarifying the Impact of Symbolic Racism, Political Psychology, 2009, 30, 5

Measures of symbolic racism (SR) have often been used to tap racial prejudice toward Blacks. However, given the wording of questions used for this purpose, some of the apparent effects on attitudes toward policies to help Blacks may instead be due to political conservatism, attitudes toward government, and/or attitudes toward redistributive government policies in general. Using data from national probability sample surveys and an experiment, we explored whether SR has effects even when controlling for these potential confounds and whether its effects are specific to policies involving Blacks. Holding constant conservatism and attitudes toward limited government, SR predicted Whites' opposition to policies designed to help Blacks and more weakly predicted attitudes toward social programs whose beneficiaries were racially ambiguous. An experimental manipulation of policy beneficiaries revealed that SR predicted policy attitudes when Blacks were the beneficiary but not when women were. These findings are consistent with the claim that SR's association with racial policy preferences is not due to these confounds.

60. Kim-Pong Tam, Al Au, Angela Ka-Yee Leung, Attributionally more complex people show less punitiveness and racism, Journal of Research in Personality, 2008, 42, 4, 1074

Based on past findings that attributionally more complex people make less fundamental attribution error, it was hypothesized that they would show less punitiveness and racism. In a study of 102 undergraduates, this hypothesis received robust support. The effect of attributional complexity was significant in two different punitiveness measures, a rehabilitation support measure, and two different racism measures. Also, this effect still held when demographic variables, crime victimization history, and need for cognition were statistically controlled. Moreover, attributional complexity mediated the effect of need for cognition and gender on punitiveness and racism. Theoretical implications are discussed.

61. P. J. Henry, College Sophomores in the Laboratory Redux: Influences of a Narrow Data Base on Social Psychology's View of the Nature of Prejudice, Psychological Inquiry, 2008, 19, 2, 49

Twenty years have passed since Sears (1986) alerted social psychologists to the many possible dangers faced by relying on a database composed mostly of students, especially with respect to the generalizability of the theoretical conclusions we come to. With a focus this time on the prejudice literature, this article examines how much has changed in our approach to whom we study. Content analyses show that prejudice researchers who publish in social psychology's major journals continue to rely heavily on student samples. Next, data are presented showing that important differences may exist between student and nonstudent participants in terms of how prejudice-related variables are expressed and used. The article concludes by raising metatheoretical concerns about the continued use of student samples both in the conclusions we arrive at as a science and in the very topics we study in the prejudice literature, with various recommendations suggested for decreasing this trend in relying on such a narrow database.

62. David O. Sears, College Student-itis Redux, Psychological Inquiry, 2008, 19, 2, 72

It is said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. If so, I feel flattered indeed. My good friend and collaborator P.J. Henry here replicates a piece I did more than 20 years ago, extends it, and does it better! Any of my mild disagreements come with great respect, gratitude, and affection for the author.

63. Colette Van Laar, Jim Sidanius, Shana Levin, Ethnic-Related Curricula and Intergroup Attitudes in College: Movement Toward and Away From the In-Group, Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 2008, 38, 6

Using a 5-year longitudinal study, we investigated the long-term effects of courses with ethnic studies content and courses with Latino or Black professors on university students' intergroup attitudes. We found that these curricular variables significantly affected the intergroup attitudes of students beyond pre-existing differences in attitudes and beyond other curriculum variables. As expected, we found differences between ethnic groups: White students showed movement toward other groups as a result of these curricular factors, whereas Latino and African American students showed both increased tolerance toward other groups and movement toward the in-group. The results are discussed in terms of group status differences between the dominant White majority and the stigmatized Latino and Black minority groups.

64. Felicia Pratto, Eileen V. Pitpitan, Ethnocentrism and Sexism: How Stereotypes Legitimize Six Types of Power, Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2008, 2, 6

We review evidence of inequality associated with gender and social categories like ethnicity with respect to six types of power: control of resources, force, legitimacy, obligations, knowledge, and sexuality. Presuming that stereotypes are one means of legitimizing power differentials between groups, we review research on stereotype contents for both ethnicity and gender with respect to the six forms of power. The review reveals a number of rhetorical means by which stereotypes legitimize ethnic dominants and men having particular forms of power, such as disguising the exercise of power by describing it in individualistic rather than relational terms, and also how stereotypes de-legitimize women and ethnic subordinates from obtaining particular forms of power, such as by stating that what they desire and their virtues preclude exercising power. A new research agenda regarding stereotypes and how they legitimize group power differences is outlined.

65. Laurie A. Rudman, On Babies and Bathwater: A Call for Diversification and Diagnosis, Psychological Inquiry, 2008, 19, 2, 84

Henry (this issue) has provided a critical reminder that social psychologists’ overreliance on university samples restricts our ability to test universal hypotheses regarding all of our topic areas, including prejudice. The first purpose of my commentary is to applaud his efforts and to urge our colleagues to heed his advice because social psychologists’ preference (prejudice, if you will) for internal over external validity has created serious image problems for the field. The people in Washington responsible for funding decisions too often point to convenience samples as an excuse to trivialize our discipline. As many of our esteemed colleagues have recently discussed in public forums, social psychology suffers from a branding problem. It is necessary for us to “think outside the lab” and beyond college student samples to improve our standing in the eyes of our fellow scientists and the public at large.

66. Agustín Echebarria-Echabe, Emilia Fernández Guede, A New Measure of Anti-Arab Prejudice: Reliability and Validity Evidence, Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 2007, 37, 5

Two studies were conducted to provide reliability and validity support for a new anti-Arab prejudice scale. The scale was designed to fit to the European context and showed very satisfactory reliability. Moreover, both studies provided convergent validity support. Anti-Arab prejudice was correlated with authoritarianism, anti-Semitism, and conservatism. The correlation between the new scale and an adapted version of McConahay's (1986) Modern Racism scale was very strong. Furthermore, the second study provided predictive validity support. Scores in the new scale explained 20% of the variance in an ulterior actual behavior (to return a signed form supporting an association aimed to defend European values and culture against Islamization).

67. Colin Wayne Leach, Aarti Iyer, Anne Pedersen, Angry opposition to government redress: When the structurally advantaged perceive themselves as relatively deprived, British Journal of Social Psychology, 2007, 46, 1

We examined (structurally advantaged) non-Aborigines' willingness for political action against government redress to (structurally disadvantaged) Aborigines in Australia. We found non-Aborigines opposed to government redress to be high in symbolic racism and to perceive their ingroup as deprived relative to Aborigines. However, only perceived relative deprivation was associated with feelings of group-based anger. In addition, consistent with relative deprivation and emotion theory, it was group-based anger that fully mediated a willingness for political action against government redress. Thus, the specific group-based emotion of anger explained why symbolic racism and relative deprivation promoted a willingness for political action against government redress to a structurally disadvantaged out-group. Theoretical and political implications are discussed.

68. Franciska Krings, José Olivares, At the doorstep to employment: Discrimination against immigrants as a function of applicant ethnicity, job type, and raters' prejudice, International Journal of Psychology, 2007, 42, 6

This study examined the impact of applicant ethnicity, job type, and prejudice on evaluation biases and intentions to interview in an experimental simulation. We suggest that bias and discrimination are more likely when foreign applicants who belong to disliked ethnic groups apply for jobs that require high interpersonal skills, and when raters are prejudiced against immigrants. Subjects were Swiss university students who evaluated Swiss, Spanish, and Kosovo Albanian fictitious applicants. Foreign applicants were second-generation immigrants, i.e., Swiss-born descendants of immigrants. Thus, all applicants had similar schooling and language proficiencies but differed with respect to ethnicity. As predicted, discrimination was only observed for members of the disliked ethnic group (Kosovo Albanian) and not for members of the well-accepted group (Spanish). Moreover, this discrimination was only apparent when applying for a job requiring high interpersonal skills and not when applying for a job requiring high technical skills. Symbolic prejudice towards second-generation immigrants interacted with applicant ethnicity and job type to affect evaluations of foreign applicants: Persons high in symbolic prejudice devalued foreign applicants belonging to the disliked group but only when applying for a job requiring high interpersonal skills. Overt prejudice was unrelated to evaluations and intentions to interview. These results suggest that discrimination against immigrants is highly specific, targeting only members of certain ethnic groups who apply for certain types of jobs. Moreover, evaluation biases may be more apparent in raters who are prejudiced. Thus, our results support the notion that discrimination for employment results from a complex interaction between characteristics of the applicant, the job, and the rater.

69. Franciska Krings, Franziska Tschan, Sophie Bettex, Determinants of Attitudes toward Affirmative Action in a Swiss Sample, Journal of Business and Psychology, 2007, 21, 4, 585

162 Swiss employees were surveyed to assess knowledge of and attitudes toward different types of affirmative action programs (AAPs) for women. Findings show that knowledge of AAPs was limited and AAPs were most frequently associated with child care measures. Attitudes toward opportunity enhancement programs, especially toward child care, were more positive than toward preferential selection and positive discriminatory programs. Women held more positive attitudes toward AAPs. However, for some attitudes, gender differences were entirely mediated by symbolic prejudice toward working women. Independently of gender, symbolic prejudice was a key predictor of all attitudes. Measures of self-view (self-esteem and gender self-concept) were largely unrelated to attitudes toward AAPs. Implications for research and organizations are discussed.

70. Mikael Hjerm, Do Numbers Really Count? Group Threat Theory Revisited, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2007, 33, 8, 1253

A specific case of group threat theory states that the size of a given minority has a direct bearing on anti-immigrant attitudes amongst the majority, a hypothesis that has been shown to have some merit, especially in the USA. This article embarks on group threat theory by focusing on the actual as well as the perceived size of a minority under different political circumstances. Data are drawn from the European Social Survey. After using multilevel analysis for 20 European countries, the paper concludes that neither actual nor perceived size matter for anti-immigrant attitudes in Europe. Nor does size have any effect under different economic or political contexts. This challenges both the theoretical foundation of this specific case of group threat as well as the European political discourse that claims that immigration needs to be reduced in order to lessen tension and, in the long run, preserve a stable democracy.

71. M. M. Chao, J. Chen, G. I. Roisman, Y.-y. Hong, Essentializing Race: Implications for Bicultural Individuals' Cognition and Physiological Reactivity, Psychological Science, 2007, 18, 4, 341

It is a widely held belief that racial groups have underlying essences. We hypothesized that bicultural individuals who hold this essentialist belief about race are oriented to perceive rigid interracial boundaries and experience difficulty passing between their ethnic culture and the host culture. As predicted, we found that the more strongly Chinese American participants endorsed an essentialist belief about race, the less effective they were in switching rapidly between Chinese and American cultural frames in a reaction time task (Study 1), and the greater emotional reactivity they exhibited (reflected in heightened skin conductance) while they talked about their Chinese and American cultural experiences (Study 2). Taken together, these findings suggest that essentialist beliefs about race set up a mind-set that influences how bicultural individuals navigate between their ethnic and host cultures.

72. Samuel Noh, Violet Kaspar, K.A.S. Wickrama, Overt and Subtle Racial Discrimination and Mental Health: Preliminary Findings for Korean Immigrants, American Journal of Public Health, 2007, 97, 7, 1269

We examined differential effects of overt and subtle forms of racial discrimination on 2 dimensions of mental health—positive affect and depressive symptoms, and explored the mediating roles of emotional arousal and cognitive appraisal. Cross-sectional survey data were collected through face-to-face interviews with a sample (N=180) of adult Korean immigrants living in Toronto, Ontario. Maximum likelihood estimates of path coefficients were obtained using structural equation models. Perceived racial discrimination was associated with both the erosion of positive affect and depressive symptoms. Overt discrimination was associated with the erosion of positive affect, and subtle discrimination was associated with depressive symptoms. Effects of subtle discrimination on depressive symptoms were mediated through cognitive appraisal. The results emphasize the salience of subtle discrimination for the mental health of Asian immigrants. Experiences of overt racial bias seemed to be of little importance for the levels of depressive symptoms among those in our sample, although the experience of blatant discrimination tended to reduce positive mood.

73. Nyla R. Branscombe, Michael T. Schmitt, Kristin Schiffhauer, Racial attitudes in response to thoughts of white privilege, European Journal of Social Psychology, 2007, 37, 2

Thinking about the benefits gained from a privileged group membership can threaten social identity and evoke justification of the existing status difference between the ingroup and a disadvantaged group. For White Americans, racial privilege may be justified by concurring with modern racist attitudes. In Experiment 1, White Americans randomly assigned to think about White privilege expressed greater modern racism compared to those assigned to think about White disadvantage or a race-irrelevant topic. In Experiment 2, we found that increased racism in response to thoughts of White privilege was limited to those who highly identified with their racial category. In contrast, when White racial identification was sufficiently low, thoughts of White privilege reliably reduced modern racism. We discuss the implications of these findings for the meaning of modern racism and prejudice reduction.

74. P. J. Henry, Christine Reyna, Value Judgments: The Impact of Perceived Value Violations on American Political Attitudes, Political Psychology, 2007, 28, 3

Values are proposed to have an influence on politics via multiple expressions, and two such value expressions are explored in this manuscript: abstract value expressions and judgmental value expressions. In particular, it is believed that judgmental value expressions (or perceptions of value violations) will have a particularly strong influence in determining attitudes toward policies designed to help specific groups in society. This study analyzed data from two samples regarding attitudes toward welfare and marriage rights for gays. It was found that perceptions that each group violates a specific value played a more important role in predicting political attitudes than abstract value expressions, general negative affect directed toward the group, and political ideology. The results are contextualized in a discussion of the role values play in the politics of intergroup relations.

75. Brian S. Lowery, Miguel M. Unzueta, Eric D. Knowles, Phillip Atiba Goff, Concern for the in-group and opposition to affirmative action., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2006, 90, 6, 961

The present experiments suggest that the desire to benefit the in-group drives dominant-group members' policy preferences, independent of concern for out-groups' outcomes. In Experiment 1, the effect of a manipulation of affirmative action procedures on policy support was mediated by how Whites expected the policy to affect fellow Whites, but not by the expected effect on minorities. In Experiments 2 and 3, when focused on losses for the White in-group, Whites' racial identity was negatively related to support for affirmative action. However, when focused on gains for the Black out-group or when participants were told that Whites were not affected by the policy, racial identity did not predict attitudes toward the policy. In Experiments 2 and 3, perceived fairness mediated these effects.

76. Hart Blanton, James Jaccard, Patricia M. Gonzales, Charlene Christie, Decoding the implicit association test: Implications for criterion prediction, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2006, 42, 2, 192

The implicit association test (IAT) is believed to measure implicit evaluations by assessing reaction times on two cognitive tasks, often termed “compatible” and “incompatible” tasks. A common rationale for studying the IAT is that it might improve our prediction and understanding of meaningful psychological criteria. To date, however, no clear psychometric theory has been advanced for this measure. We examine the theory, methods and analytic strategies surrounding the IAT in the context of criterion prediction to determine measurement and causal models a researcher embraces (knowingly or unknowingly) by using the test. Our analyses reveal that the IAT revolves around interpretation of two distinct relative constructs, one at the conceptual level and one at the observed level. We show that interest in relative implicit evaluations at the conceptual level imposes a causal model that is restrictive in form. We then examine measurement models of the IAT and show how computing a difference score at the observed level may lack empirical justification. These issues are highlighted in a study replicating an effect established in the literature (Study 1). We then introduce a new variant of the IAT and use it to evaluate the reasonableness of traditional IAT methods (Study 2).

77. Christine Reyna, P. J. Henry, William Korfmacher, Amanda Tucker, Examining the principles in principled conservatism: The role of responsibility stereotypes as cues for deservingness in racial policy decisions., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2006, 90, 1, 109

Why do educated conservatives oppose affirmative action? Those in the "principled conservatism" camp say opposition is based on principled judgments of fairness about the policies. Others, however, argue that opposition is based on racism. The present article offers an alternative perspective that may reconcile these contradictory points of view. In 2 studies, the authors show 2 major findings: (a) that conservatives oppose affirmative action more for Blacks than for other groups, in this case women, and (b) that the relationship between conservatism and affirmative action attitudes is mediated best by group-based stereotypes that offer deservingness information and not by other potential mediators like old-fashioned racism or the perceived threat that affirmative action poses to oneself. The authors conclude that educated conservatives are indeed principled in their opposition to affirmative action, but those principles are group based not policy based.

78. Eva G. T. Green, Christian Staerklé, David O. Sears, Symbolic Racism and Whites' Attitudes Towards Punitive and Preventive Crime Policies., Law and Human Behavior, 2006, 30, 4, 435

This study analyzes the determinants of Whites’ support for punitive and preventive crime policies. It focuses on the predictive power of beliefs about race as described by symbolic racism theory. A dataset with 849 White respondents from three waves of the Los Angeles County Social Survey was used. In order to assess the weight of racial factors in crime policy attitudes, the effects of a range of race-neutral attitude determinants were controlled for, namely individual and structural crime attributions, perceived seriousness of crime, crime victimization, conservatism and news exposure. Results show a strong effect of symbolic racism on both types of crime policies, and in particular on punitive policies. High levels of symbolic racism are associated with support for tough, punitive crime policies and with opposition to preventive policies. Sub-dimensions of symbolic racism qualified these relationships, by showing that internal symbolic racism (assessing perceived individual deficiencies of Blacks) was most strongly predictive of punitiveness, whereas external symbolic racism (denial of institutional discrimination) predicted opposition to structural remedies. On the whole, despite the effects of race-neutral factors, the impact of symbolic racism on policy attitudes was substantial. Thus, White public opinion on both punitive and preventive crime policies is at least partially driven by racial prejudice.

79. Philip J. Mazzocco, Timothy C. Brock, Gregory J. Brock, Kristina R. Olson, Mahzarin R. Banaji, The Cost of Being Black: White Americans' Perceptions and the Question of Reparations, Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, 2006, 3, 02

White Americans have long resisted the idea of reparations to the descendants of slaves. We examine the psychological basis of such resistance, primarily testing the possibility that resistance may be a function of Whites' perception of the ongoing cost of being Black. White participants (n = 958) across twelve independent samples (varying in age, student status, and geographic location) were asked variations of the question: How much should you be paid to continue to live the remainder of your life as a Black person? Participants generally required low median amounts, less than $10,000, to make the race change, whereas they requested high amounts, $1,000,000, to give up television. To the extent that larger amounts were requested, support for reparations also increased. Attempts to educate participants about Black cost/White privilege had negligible effects on assessments of the cost of being Black and support for reparations. Together, these results suggest that White resistance to reparations for Black Americans stems from fundamental biases in estimating the true cost of being Black. The implications of our findings for color-blind and multiculturalist conceptual approaches are discussed,

80. David O. Sears, Victoria Savalei, The Political Color Line in America: Many “Peoples of Color” or Black Exceptionalism?, Political Psychology, 2006, 27, 6

Despite the successes of the civil rights movement, a largely impermeable color line continues to restrict African Americans from assimilation into the broader American society. In the meantime high rates of immigration have produced an increasingly culturally diverse population. A “people of color” hypothesis suggests that the color line the new immigrants face resembles that imposed on African Americans. A “black exceptionalism” hypothesis suggests instead that the color line will be more porous for them, allowing for greater assimilation over successive generations, including a gradual weakening of politicized racial and ethnic group consciousness. Using data from Los Angeles County Social Surveys, we find that the largest new immigrant group, Latinos, like blacks, show strongly group-interested policy preferences and strong group consciousness. However, both effects are stronger for recent Latino immigrants than for the U.S.-born. We conclude that the new immigrant groups are increasingly likely to assimilate politically into the broader society in future generations, whereas a rather strict color line will continue to restrict blacks and maintain their distinctiveness.

81. Pamela Paxton, Anthony Mughan, What's to Fear from Immigrants? Creating an Assimilationist Threat Scale, Political Psychology, 2006, 27, 4

We argue that cultural threat, stressed in recent studies of anti-immigrant sentiment, is properly measured in the U.S. case as “assimilationist threat”: a resentful perception that immigrants are failing to adopt the cultural norms and lifestyle of their new homeland. We explore the meaning and form of assimilationist threat in the minds of Americans through an analysis of four focus groups, two in Los Angeles, CA, and two in Columbus, OH. Using information from the focus groups, we develop and test a set of survey questions covering three dimensions of immigrants’ commitment to their new country: language, productivity, and citizenship. We produce a summary scale of assimilationist threat that can be used by other researchers seeking to understand the causes and consequences of anti-immigrant sentiment.

82. Stanley Feldman, Leonie Huddy, Racial Resentment and White Opposition to Race-Conscious Programs: Principles or Prejudice?, American Journal of Political Science, 2005, 49, 1

White racial resentment is associated with opposition to a broad range of racial policies but it is unclear whether it derives from racial prejudice or stems from ideological principles. To resolve this ambiguity, we examined the impact of racial resentment on support for a college-scholarship program in which program beneficiaries' race and socioeconomic class was experimentally varied. The analyses yield a potentially troubling finding: racial resentment means different things to white liberals and conservatives. Among liberals, racial resentment conveys the political effects of racial prejudice, by predicting program support for black but not white students, and is better predicted by overt measures of racial prejudice than among conservatives. Among conservatives, racial resentment appears more ideological. It is closely tied to opposition to race-conscious programs regardless of recipient race and is only weakly tied to measures of overt prejudice. Racial resentment, therefore, is not a clear-cut measure of racial prejudice for all Americans.

83. Christine Reyna, Amanda Tucker, William Korfmacher, P. J. Henry, Searching for Common Ground between Supporters and Opponents of Affirmative Action, Political Psychology, 2005, 26, 5

Supporters and opponents of affirmative action are often characterized as debating about a single, consensually understood type of affirmative action. However, supporters and opponents instead may have different types of policies in mind when thinking about affirmative action and may actually agree on specific manifestations of affirmative action policies more than is commonly believed. A survey conducted using a student sample and a sample from the broader Chicago-area community showed that affirmative action policies can be characterized into merit-violating versus merit-upholding manifestations. Supporters of affirmative action in general were more likely to think of affirmative action in its merit-upholding manifestations, whereas opponents were more likely to think of the merit-violating manifestations. However, both supporters and opponents showed more support for merit-upholding rather than merit-violating manifestations of affirmative action. The same pattern of results was upheld even when splitting the samples into those who endorsed negative racial attitudes versus those who did not, suggesting that even those who may be considered racist will endorse affirmative action policies that uphold merit values. The results are discussed in terms of the importance of clarifying the political discourse about what affirmative action is and what it is designed to do.

84. Christopher Tarman, David O. Sears, The Conceptualization and Measurement of Symbolic Racism, Journal of Politics, 2005, 67, 3

The conceptualization and measurement of symbolic racism have been the subjects of a number of critiques, of which we address four: (1) we briefly review the history of its past conceptualization, which has been somewhat loose, and of its past measurement, which has been more consistent than often suggested. We then address three other critiques empirically. In each case the results support the original theory: (2) symbolic racism is an internally consistent belief system; it does have individual and structural variants, but they are highly correlated and have virtually identical effects on whites’ racial policy preferences; (3) the effects of symbolic racism on whites’ racial policy preferences are not artifacts of shared-item content with policy-attitude items (both conclusions are replicated in quite similar form in two surveys); and (4) symbolic racism is a distinctive belief system in its own right, encompassing a set of attitudes different from those in ideological conservatism, antiegalitarianism, individualism, and old-fashioned racism (a conclusion replicated in similar form in six surveys). Perhaps most importantly, the effects of symbolic racism on racial policy preferences are the same regardless of which conventional measure of symbolic racism is used.

85. David O. Sears, P. J. Henry, The origins of symbolic racism., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2003, 85, 2, 259

The theory of symbolic racism places its origins in a blend of anti-Black affect and conservative values, particularly individualism. We clarify that hypothesis, test it directly, and report several findings consistent with it. Study 1 shows that racial prejudice and general political conservatism fall into 2 separate factors, with symbolic racism loading about equally on both. Study 2 found that the anti-Black affect and individualism significantly explain symbolic racism. The best-fitting model both fuses those 2 elements into a single construct (Black individualism) and includes them separately. The effects of Black individualism on racial policy preferences are mostly mediated by symbolic racism. Study 3 shows that Black individualism is distinctively racial, with effects distinctly different from either an analogous gender individualism or race-neutral individualism.

86. Stephen M. Quintana, Ethnicity, Race, and Children's Social Development, Chapter 16, The Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Childhood Social Development: Second Edition

Children's interracial interactions and attitudes have been the interest of researchers for nearly 6 decades. The increasing globalized nature of society, including ease of movement to new lands, ensures that many children will continue to function in interracial contexts. Children's social development in interracial contexts has been of considerable interest to researchers for many decades, and this research has uncovered important insights into children's social development. For example, children develop notions about ethnicity and race early in life, oftentimes even before they have interethnic or interracial contact. Children learn about other social categories, such as gender-or age-related groupings, through extensive interpersonal interactions, but young, preschool children often learn about those who are ethnically or racially different in the absence of personal contact. Despite this social distance, the precociousness of children's learning about race and ethnicity suggests that they have strong motivations or natural inclinations to learn about social categories involving race and ethnicity. Research into how children learn about race and ethnicity is particularly interesting because several popular notions regarding race and ethnicity have been contradicted by psychological research.

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Monday, August 14, 2017

When You Are Governed By Psychopaths - 8

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