Everyone's a Little Bit Racist, but It May Not Be Your Fault

Since we are social creatures with few instincts, who depend on learning from others what we need to know to survive, we have to be automatically affected by those around us.

www.sciencedaily.com

ScienceDaily (Sep. 29, 2011) — Everyone's a little bit racist, posits the song from the musical Avenue Q. But it may not be your fault, according to research in the latest edition of the British Journal of Social Psychology. In looking for the culprit as to why people tend to display tinges of racism, sexism or ageism, even towards members of their own group, a research team, led by the Georgia Institute of Technology, found that our culture may be partially to blame.
While previous psychological studies have shown that racism, sexism and ageism tend to be universal, a new study led by Paul Verhaeghen, professor in Georgia Tech's School of Psychology, found that works in the American culture, namely literature, movies, TV, radio and the Internet, may contribute to the problem by exhibiting the same stereotypes that society works so hard to snuff out.

[...]

In looking at their results from the tests and what appeared in BEAGLE, they found that participants responded faster to the pairs that were more often found together in the literature, whether they were stereotypical or not. So words like black tended to have a much stronger correlation with words that are associated with negative and positive stereotypes like lazy or musical, than with words like goofy that aren't associated with stereotypes. But pairs that were often found in the literature together, like day and light or summer and sunny also inspired a faster response time for participants than words that weren't found together in BEAGLE. Other pairs that had strong correlations were white with greedy and successful; male with loud and strong; female with weak and warm; old with lonely and wise; and young with healthy and reckless.

This leads scientists to believe that the very fast 'gut' reaction measured through response times doesn't have much to do with the prejudice of the subjects, but a lot more with how often people have seen or heard these words paired over a lifetime. They also point out that response times were not correlated with the questionnaires about prejudice.

"One of the things these findings suggest is that for those of us who, like me, very often feel guilty about these gut reactions you have and you're not supposed to have is those gut reactions are normal and they have very little to do with you. They have more to do with the culture around you," said Verhaeghen. "What is more important is your behavior, rather than your gut reaction."

"The second thing is that there's a reason for political correctness. At least, as studies suggest, it might be a good idea to not put stereotypes out there too clearly, because if you do, people will internalize them."
..