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Stereotyping communities, not individuals:
Effects of race on audience interpretations of factors that lead to
criminal behavior
Bradley W. Gorham
Assistant Professor, Communications
S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications
Syracuse University
362 Newhouse II
Syracuse, NY 13244
315-443-1950
[log in to unmask]
A research grant from S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications
at Syracuse University was used to fund this research. The author
would like to thank Dave Kurpius for his help in creating stimulus
tapes and Jamie Butler for her work in securing participants.
Abstract
Stereotyping communities, not individuals:
Effects of race on audience interpretations of factors that lead to
criminal behavior
The study manipulated the race of a suspect in a TV news crime story
and surveyed the responses of 208 White staff members of a midsized
university. Although the study expected that the presence of an
African American suspect would trigger the stereotype and lead people
to think that the African American suspect turned to crime because of
various internal factors, the opposite was found. External causes
were found to be rated significantly higher for the Black suspect
than for the White suspect. Prejudice was also found interact with
suspect race in unexpected ways. The results are evaluated in the
context of which social norms participants may have activated in
response to the news story and how those responses reflect social
assumptions about race.
Stereotyping communities 3
Stereotyping communities, not individuals:
Effects of race on audience interpretations of factors that lead to
criminal behavior
One of the reasons why people get concerned about the presence of
stereotypes in the media is because we know that stereotypes not only
give us a misleading and overgeneralized image of what people from
some social group are like, but also why they are like that. That
is, stereotypes are often as much explanation as they are
description, and it is this seductive ability of stereotypes to
explain the status quo that makes them a target of concern.
For mass communication researchers, this concern might manifest
itself in the study of any number of media texts, but one type of
text in particular has received a lot of attention: images of
African Americans in television news. Many studies have examined the
effects of stereotypical images on audience reactions to the news
(for example, Oliver, 1999; Peffley, Shields & Williams, 1996) and
the general relationship between news use and perceptions of African
Americans (for example, Domke, McCoy & Torres, 1999). But how do
images of African Americans on the news affect the explanations
people make for what they see?
This study examines the effects of race on the kind of explanations
people make to explain what they've seen on a television news crime
story. It approaches this question using the theoretical tools of
social psychology and intergroup dynamics and an experimental methodology.
Stereotypes, social psychology, and the perception of why others act
the way they do
The ability to abstract generalizations from specific instances in
the world results in what social psychologists call schemas. Schemas
are cognitive frameworks that organize knowledge by providing a
"rough sketch" of the general properties of objects, events or other
categories that can be used to simplify perception. By organizing
existing knowledge as well as helping to parse incoming stimuli from
the environment, schema help make efficient use of our scarce
cognitive resources (Rumelhart, 1984). Thus, we have schema for the
characteristics of objects (such as chairs), for the way events
should unfold (like going to a restaurant), and for what certain
people should be like. These last schemas are called stereotypes.
Hamilton and Trolier (1986) define a stereotype as "a cognitive
structure that contains the perceiver's knowledge, beliefs, and
expectancies about some human group," (p.133). Stereotypes, because
they are schema, help simplify a complex social environment by
quickly and efficiently processing incoming information based on the
presence of a few relevant characteristics. Using the prototypical
information stored in our schema for people belonging to a certain
social group, we can quickly make judgments about that person and our
potential interaction with him or her.
Stereotypes are particular sets of categorical knowledge about
social groups (Wittenbrink, Hilton & Gist, 1998), which suggests that
the relationship between stereotypes and social categorization needs
to be discussed. As Allport (1954/1979, p.17) pointed out almost
fifty years ago, social categorization is something that humans
do: For as long as people have been around, people have divided
themselves into reasonably coherent groups.
But what is at issue isn't the presence of human groups but the way
the groups are categorized as possessing some characteristics and not
others. Wittenbrink et al. (1998) argue that the perception of
differences in the social environment is the result of people
applying "naive theories" about the existence of coherent categories
to begin with. That is, people "see" coherent categories among other
people because they apply their own lay theories that people not only
can be divided into groups but also that there is an explanation for
this differentiation. Citing Lakoff (1987), Wittenbrink et al.
(1998) argue that social knowledge is organized around perceiver's
naïve theories about the way the world works. "These theories
provide subjective explanations that structure the social environment
and define the partitions the perceiver imposes upon it. They
explain what a given group of people is like, what attributes the
group members share, and, more importantly, why they share these
attributes," (p.49, emphasis added).
What is important about this view of social categorization as the
result of "top-down" processes rather than "bottom-up" processes is
that it allows for the functioning of ideology in the differentiation
of social groups and the stereotypes that describe them. The "naïve
theories" that Wittenbrink et al. (1998) discuss sound like the
"taken-for-granted 'naturalized' world of common sense" that Stuart
Hall (1981, p.32) alludes to in his discussion of how ideology tends
to be most effective when it is in the background. Explanations
about social groups rarely reflect people's direct experiences with
groups, and so they are more likely found in the social knowledge
shared by members of a culture. Indeed, concern for the relationship
of stereotypes, social group categorization, and existing structures
of power and dominance were part of both Lippmann's (1922) and
Allport's (1954/1979) use of the term "stereotype." In his
definition of a stereotype, Allport noted that its purpose "is to
justify (rationalize) one's conduct in relation to the category,"
(p.191). The functioning of schemas and attitudes should be
considered not only for their cognitive utility, but also for their
ideological utility. Thus, van Dijk (1984) argues that semantic
memory is where we should look for the cognitive representation of ideology:
Ideologies organize large portions of our social life and are based
on fundamental goals, interests, and values. ...Hence, ideologies
are the cognitive reflections of our social, political, economic, and
cultural 'position' within the social structure. ...This means that
ideologies, even less than their component attitudes, are not
individual, but group based. (p. 194)
Thus, ideology in this cognitive sense is the practice of our
individual experiences and raw perceptions (the episodes of our
lives) being defined by socially constructed semantic knowledge, with
those definitions supporting existing structures of difference. That
is, our perceptions serve our group interests by making attributes in
the social environment that might explain differences perceptually
salient. For example, Wittenbrink et al. (1998) contend that there
is nothing in the environment that naturally makes race the basis of
group differentiation. This was indeed the case for a long
time: race was not seen as an important marker of distinction until
the slave trade came under increasing intellectual and economic
attack (Montagu, 1997). Thus, it was the operation of ideology that
"created" race as a salient characteristic by which to group people.
This perspective is given added weight in light of the findings of
social identity theory and research on the attribution
error. According to social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1986),
people's self-concept involves both beliefs about their own abilities
and attributes as well as beliefs about themselves garnered from
their perceptions of the social groups to which they belong. Because
people wish to maintain a positive social identity, people will
strive to create favorable comparisons between their ingroups and
outgroups when their social identity is threatened (Crocker &
Luhtanen, 1990). Thus, people will denigrate the outgroup in an
attempt to make the ingroup look better. Research also highlights
another aspect of this intergroup dynamic: members of the outgroup
are seen as being relatively homogeneous in that the attributes that
are said to belong to the outgroup are assumed to hold for most
members of that group. Ingroups, on the other hand, are assumed to
feature more variety among members (Linville, Salovey, & Fischer, 1986).
The ultimate attribution error (Pettigrew, 1979), on the other hand,
attempts to explain the behaviors of ingroups and outgroups as
functions of either internal or external causes. Pettigrew, as both
a tribute to and an extension of Allport's (1954) analysis of the
cognitive component of prejudice, built on Heider's (1958) concept of
the fundamental attribution error. In Pettigrew's conceptualization,
ingroup members who perceive a person performing a negative behavior
will be more likely to attribute that behavior to dispositional
(internal) explanations if the person is from an outgroup, whereas
they will attribute the same negative behavior to situational
(external) factors if performed by an ingroup member. Likewise,
positive behaviors will likely be attributed to situational causes
when performed by outgroup members and dispositional causes when
performed by members of the ingroup. Thus, there appears to be a
preference for attributions that help serve the interests of the
ingroup (Hewstone, 1990).
In this context, then, our social reality beliefs about racial
groups can be seen as having a cognitive component, in that our
stereotypes about these groups are stored as simply another type of
schema. Since they are schema, they are subject to all the
processing characteristics that seem to involve all schema: they aid
in parsing incoming information, they can be primed, they help
structure expectancies, and they can direct our perception of
subsequent information. But these schema should not be seen as being
simple reflections of the actual clustering of traits in the
environment; rather, they reflect the operation of ideology in the
social environment and thus reflect the distinctions that we apply to
the human groups we encounter. Thus, the content of our stereotypes
can change over time as our collective representation of others
change (Dovidio & Gaertner, 1986) or as the relative utility of those
representations change.
More than mere description, though, there also seems to be a
cognitive component to the explanatory component of "race." The
operation of social identity and the ultimate attribution error would
seem to help provide a mechanism by which the traits that make up our
stereotypes about social groups lead to naive theories about why
these groups behave the way they do. Again, these mechanisms would
appear to operate in ways that support how dominant social groups see
themselves. For example, Peffley, Hurwitz, and Sniderman (1997)
manipulated the race of people described in the questions of a
telephone survey. In an analysis of over 1800 of these manipulated
telephone surveys, they found that racial stereotypes played an
important role in people's assessments of welfare mothers and
criminals, but only when those targets were African
American. Furthermore, the assessments of welfare mothers were
closely related to beliefs about African Americans' commitment to the
work ethic, suggesting that the causal explanation that African
American welfare mothers do not want to work because they are
inherently lazy was more salient to respondents than a similar belief
about Whites.
Research using mass media
There have been several studies that looked at the effects of
manipulated news stories on the attributions people make. Gilliam,
Iyengar, Simon and Wright (1996) manipulated the race of a suspect in
a crime story to examine the effects this manipulation would have on
television viewers. In their study, the mug shot of the suspect from
a local television news story about a crime was digitized and
"painted" to alter the suspect's complexion. In addition to altering
the race of the suspect, Gilliam et al. also changed how violent the
crime in the news story was; some viewers were shown a story about a
murder at an ATM machine, while others watched a story about a high
school baseball coach who had been arrested for embezzling school
funds. Both versions of the stories included a mug shot of the suspect.
The sample for the Gilliam et al. (1996) study consisted of 139
non-faculty White adults employed at UCLA. People were told that
they were participating in a study concerning "selective perception"
of local news and given a pretest survey to ascertain their
demographics and political beliefs (p.16). Participants were then
shown a 15-minute segment of a local newscast, including commercials,
that contained the manipulated crime story. Following the newscast,
"subjects completed a lengthy questionnaire that included questions
about the significance of crime, the causes of crime, their preferred
methods for dealing with the problem, and their stereotypes of
various social groups, including African-Americans," (p.16).
Gilliam et al. (1996) found a significant main effect for the race
of the suspect. Subjects expressed more concern for crime and were
more likely to attribute the causes of crime to group characteristics
for the African American suspects compared to the white suspects.
Interestingly, there was no main effect for the violence of the
crime. Furthermore, the interaction of the race of the suspect and
the level of stereotype endorsement was also significant: "There was
little difference in the level of concern for crime among low
stereotypers exposed to the black or white perpetrator. Among high
stereotypers, however, exposure to the black rather than the white
perpetrator boosted concern about crime by a factor of .30," (Gilliam
et al., 1996, p.18). Similar results were found for the measures of
causal attribution and support of punitive measures.
Power, Murphy and Coover (1996, study 1) also saw priming as playing
a role in the effects of race-related images. Of particular interest
was the way in which stereotypes could prime causal attributions for
the circumstances afflicting the subjects of media messages. Citing
Gray (1989) and Jhally and Lewis (1992), Power et al. note that
viewers could resolve the seeming inconsistency between the reality
of the Black urban poor and portrayals of Blacks such as in The Cosby
Show "by focusing on the individual as the causal agent of his or her
life circumstances" (p.39). Power et al. suggested that when
negative racial stereotypes are primed, subsequent evaluations of a
target Black person should differ in terms of the attribution of
negative behaviors compared to the evaluations of the same target
following a counter-stereotypical example.
To test this hypothesis, Power et al. (1996, study 1) first asked
110 white students to evaluate a new campus newsletter that featured
an autobiography of an African American student named Chris Miller
(his race was indicated by the use of a photograph). The
autobiographical information was manipulated into a stereotypical
condition, which contained information pertaining to four traits
prominent in the stereotype of African Americans, and a
counter-stereotypical condition, which contained the opposite of
these four. A neutral text was used as a control. In what they
thought was an unrelated study, subjects were then asked their
evaluations of two media events - the beating of Rodney King and
Magic Johnson's disclosure of his HIV status (p.43). Subjects were
also asked about their evaluations of African Americans overall.
As predicted, those who had read the stereotyped version of the
campus newsletter were most likely to assign dispositional
attribution and blame Rodney King and Magic Johnson for their
circumstances. Those who had seen the counter-stereotypical
newsletter were least likely to make dispositional attributions,
while the control group fell in between. All groups made more
dispositional attributions for Magic Johnson than Rodney King,
suggesting that his plight was more clearly seen as the result of his
own failings. This was especially true among the female participants
in the study.
Thus, the Power et al. (1996) study suggests that
stereotype-congruent attributional differences can be primed by the
presence of the stereotype. These results suggest that the priming
of (social category) stereotypes of African Americans triggers
processing that follows the ultimate attribution error. This process
thereby enhances the ability of the news to produce not just
stereotype-congruent interpretations but also interpretations that
support dominant racial ideology by providing the explanation for the
stereotype as well as another example of it.
Given these results, the following hypotheses are offered:
H1: White participants will make more dispositional (internal)
attributions of criminal behavior following an African American
suspect compared to a White suspect.
H2: Prejudice will interact with the race of a suspect, such that
people high in prejudice will make more extreme judgments following
an African American suspect compared to a White suspect.
Methods
The results described in this paper are part of a larger study on
people's reactions to race-related television news. The sample used
in the present study consisted of 208 White adult members of the
staff of a midsized private university in the Northeastern U.S. Data
from 23 people of color who participated in the study are not
reported here. Similar to Gilliam et al.'s (1996) study, the
researcher and an assistant recruited university staff, excluding
students and faculty, to participate in an "impressions of TV news"
study by offering to pay them $10 for their time. Sessions were
scheduled for lunch hours and late afternoons over the course of two
weeks, and participants self-selected which session to
attend. Sessions were held in a room with a large video screen and
varied in size from five to thirty-three people. Upon arrival,
participants were told by the White research assistant that they
would be surveyed about the media use habits and their opinions
concerning TV news; that they would watch a short video; and that
they would then be asked to respond to the video. To encourage open
and honest responses, participants were also told about procedures
the researchers would use to safeguard the anonymity of their
responses. Once they consented to participate, the respondents were
given a pre-viewing survey.
The pre-viewing survey asked respondents to estimate their news
media use, their perception of news credibility, their motivations
for viewing TV news, and other areas that are not relevant for the
data reported here. After completing the survey, participants
watched a video of the first eight minutes of a television news
broadcast from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, which contained the
experimental manipulation. The particular version of the video for
each session was chosen by the researcher prior to the arrival of the
participants, rather than randomly selected, to try to ensure a
similar number of participants in the four conditions. Participants
saw one of four versions of the news broadcast, after which they were
given post-viewing surveys to complete. The videotape consisted of
an opening "Got Milk" commercial preceding the newscast to the cast's
first commercial break. The newscast contained four news stories, a
weather segment, and two teases before the first commercial break.
The two news anchors, a male and a female, were both White, as were
the reporters in all of the stories. Unless otherwise noted, all of
the people presented in the news stories were White. The first story
in the broadcast, lasting 30 seconds, centered on the rebuilding of a
chemical plant in Baton Rouge that had recently been damaged by an
explosion and fire. The second story in the newscast, nearly two
minutes and 15 seconds in length, focused on the families of several
victims of murder, for which a suspect had not yet been caught or
even identified. Near the end of the story, the standup reporter
announces that police, who have been tight lipped in their
investigation, will only say that they want to talk to "this
man." At this point in the story (with only about 15 seconds left in
the package), the manipulation occurred, and subjects saw one of four
different versions of the story. In all versions of the story, the
audio track, in which the reporter describes the man's height and
weight but not his race, remains the same. In two versions of the
story, a close-up photograph of an African American man's face is
shown surrounded by a red border. These two versions differed only
in the actual photograph. Similarly, two versions of the news story
featured close-up photographs of two different White men.
Two different African American men and two different White men were
used in the photographs to ensure that the results would be because
of race and not because of some unusual feature of a particular man's
face. This seems especially prudent given that research on social
perception suggests that facial characteristics can influence social
judgments (Berry & Wero, 1993). To test for the similarity of the
faces within racial conditions, photos of four different black men
and four different white men were judged using Rhodes' (1988) facial
ratings scales before the tapes were selected for use. Ten White
graduate students rated the faces, and the two that were the most
similar for each race in terms of how closely their scale scores
corresponded were used for the stimulus tape.
Two brief stories and a weather segment followed the crime
story. Two teases, one of which featured an African American
football coach and one that featured an African American state
senator, were the final segments before a brief lotto screen and a
commercial. It is at this point that the assistant turned off the
videotape and handed out the post-viewing surveys.
Following their viewing of the newscast, participants were given the
post-viewing survey. Respondents were asked about their mental
activities during viewing and their overall impressions of the
quality and credibility of the newscast. They were also asked
questions about several of the stories before being asked
specifically about the crime story. Thirteen closed-ended questions
were used to assess participant's attributions for the suspect's
behavior. The first item, adapted from Johnson et al. (1997), was a
very broad measure of people's attribution of the behavior as being
the result of situational or personality factors. The next ten items
asked participants to respond to specific factors that might have
been influential in the life of the man pictured in the story. Using
a seven-point scale, where 1 meant "not at all influential" and 7
meant "very influential," respondents were asked to indicate how
influential they thought the following factors were: poverty, violent
personality, poor education, laziness, materialism, growing up in a
bad neighborhood, dishonesty, lack of self-control, addiction, and
poor parenting. These were chosen because five of these (violent
personality, laziness, materialism, dishonesty, and lack of
self-control) represent internal causes of behavior, while the other
five represent external causes of behavior. The last two questions
in this section were adapted from Pan & Kosicki (1996) and asked
respondents how much they agreed or disagreed with the following
statements: "The suspect's condition in life is due to his not
trying hard enough," and "The suspect's condition in life is due to
past discrimination for being poor and uneducated."
The remainder of the survey included a mix of close-ended and
open-ended questions used in the larger study. The final questions
on the post-viewing survey measured demographic data but also
included Brigham's (1993) Attitude Toward Blacks scale, a 20-item,
multi-factor measure of prejudice. The ATB uses a seven-point scale
and thus ranges from possible scores of 20 (very negative attitude
toward Blacks, thus very high prejudice) to 140 (very positive
attitudes toward Blacks, thus low prejudice). For the analyses, a
median split of ATB scores was used to divide participants into High
and Low prejudice groups.
Results
As a group, the 208 participants were relatively moderate news users,
watching on average one half-hour local news program and most of one
national network newscast. Relatively high standard deviations
indicate that some people were much more frequent users of news media
than others, however. The participants had a mean age of 40.44
years, but despite efforts to recruit men, the sample was severely
skewed toward women, with 77.9% of the participants being
female. They were also a largely low-prejudiced group, with a mean
of 109 and a median on 111 on the Attitudes Toward Blacks scale.
The results from the four conditions were first compared to see the
degree to which participants answered differently within the racial
conditions. Chi-square tests of independence between the conditions
revealed no significant differences in how participants reacted
within the two racial conditions, so the data from the two White
suspect conditions and the two African American suspect conditions
were collapsed into a single White condition and a single Black condition.
One-way analysis of variance was used to test H1. As shown in Table
1, the results did not support the first hypothesis that White
participants would make more dispositional (internal) attributions
following an African American suspect compared to a White
suspect. Only one of the five individual internal attribution items
(lack of self-control), but none of the three broader attribution
questions, showed a significant difference in the expected
direction. In fact, the opposite was found: Three of the five
external attribution items (poverty, poor education, and growing up
in a bad neighborhood) had means that were significantly higher for
the African American suspect. Furthermore, two of the broader
attribution questions showed significantly higher means for the
internal end of the scale for the White suspect than for the African
American suspect.
As for the second hypothesis, which suggested that prejudice would
interact with the race of the suspect such that people higher in
prejudice would make more extreme judgments following an African
American suspect, the results are mixed. Of the 13 total dependent
variables, only five of them showed an interaction that approached or
was significant (Table 2 presents the results for these five
only). Prejudice level did not have a main effect with any of the
attribution items, but it did significantly interact with suspect
race for the external items growing up in a bad neighborhood and poor
parenting and for the internal item addiction. The interaction
between race of the suspect and prejudice level approached
significance for the external item poor education and the internal
item materialism. For all but addiction, the greatest extremes were
seen between the high prejudice White and Black suspect conditions,
with the Black suspect receiving the highest score and the White
suspect receiving the lowest. Thus for these items, at least,
prejudice does interact with the suspect's race to intensify the
effect, but given the overall pattern of results across the 13 items,
H2 received only mixed support.
Discussion
This study examined how the race of a suspect in a television news
crime story affects the reasons people cite for why the person might
turn to crime. According to social psychological theories about
intergroup perception, people should interpret the social world in
ways that make their wn groups look good, very often at the expense
of outgroups. One would expect people to judge ingroup members
engaging in negative behaviors as doing it because of outside
pressures, whereas people should be more likely to attribute negative
actions to internal or dispositional failings of the individual if
that person is a member of an outgroup. The study manipulated the
race of a suspect in a crime story and surveyed the responses of 208
White staff members of a midsized university. Although the study
expected that the presence of an African American suspect would be
enough to trigger the stereotype and cause people to think that the
African American suspect turned to crime because of various internal
factors, the opposite was found. Instead, external causes were found
to be rated significantly higher for the Black suspect than for the
White suspect. Prejudice was also found to play a role in
influencing this relationship, such that those who were high in
prejudice made even more extreme ratings for White and Black
suspects, but only for a few of the items and again in the opposite
direction of what was expected.
What is significant about these results is not that they didn't
support the expectation that an African American suspect would prime
internal attributions for his criminal behavior, but the way in which
these hypotheses were not supported. Rather than trigger internal
attributions that pin the causes of criminal behavior on the inherent
failings of the individual, these results instead suggest that the
presence of the Black face was enough to trigger the stereotype of a
problematic community. That is, clearly the stereotype had been
primed and played a role here, as the three attribution items that
showed a significant increase in the Black condition – poverty, poor
education and growing up in a bad neighborhood – figure prominently
in the cultural stereotype of African Americans (Devine & Elliot,
1995). What seems to have been primed for these largely
low-prejudiced White adults was a vision not of an African American
personally lacking in character, but instead of a product of a
distressed community. Recall that the news story offered absolutely
no information about the person besides that police "wanted to talk
to him." That required respondents to extrapolate about the man's
background based only on the man's photo and the knowledge that
police wanted to talk to him in connection with a series of
murders. That these respondents could rate poverty, poor education
and growing up in a bad neighborhood so much more highly for the
African American man suggests that a stereotype has indeed been
primed and that it has guided their interpretation of the news. But
that stereotype appears to be of the community, and so perhaps the
attribution is being placed at the level of the community, not the individual.
Another issues to keep in mind given these results concerns who the
"ingroup" may be for these participants and how that these criminal
suspects fit into the larger social scheme. Criminals of any color
may represent an outgroup for (presumably) law-abiding citizens, and
so perhaps the natural inclination for these White respondents is to
attribute crime to internal failings no matter what. However, the
community level of analysis may also play a factor in this
belief. If the community from which these White suspects have come
is assumed not to be poverty stricken and otherwise blighted, then
perhaps it is easier for these White participants to hold the White
suspects more personally accountable for their criminal ways. That
is, if a healthy, middle-class community is assumed to be the norm
for Whites, then perhaps it is easier to blame individual Whites when
they become involved in crime. If this is the case, then these
results are not only telling us about the stereotypes these White
participants hold of African American communities, but the
stereotypes they hold of White communities as well.
It is also possible that these results are simply the result of
social desirability pressures, despite the attempts to encourage
honest responses through confidentiality. There is considerable
social pressure to avoid being labeled a racist, and the university
at which the research took place has a reputation as a relatively
liberal campus. While this may be a possible explanation, these
results nonetheless encourage us to consider the powerful yet often
overlooked role that Whiteness plays as the social norm. As bell
hooks (1992) points out, Whiteness is something that people of color
have had "special knowledge" about for hundreds of years. But among
academic circles, there is an increasing amount of attention being
paid to Whiteness and how it functions as the unnamed social norm
against which other discourses are compared (Rothenberg, 2005). The
cultural stereotype of Whites, for example, is defined by traits like
intelligent, hard-working and sophisticated and closely matches the
stereotype of Americans (Author, under review; see also Devos & Banaji, 2005).
Indeed, the automatic nature of stereotyping and group
differentiation, which has been shown to be strong even when people
consciously disavow the stereotypes, may well be one of the important
factors in justifying the underlying social system in ways that
suppress any fundamental structural changes (Jost, Banaji & Nosek,
2004). Even as more and more people distance themselves from
old-fashioned racism and bigotry, the underlying assumptions that
support the status quo seem to be reflected in their automatic
information processing. Whiteness, as the unnamed norm, would
necessarily play a prominent role in that processing.
In the context of this experiment, then, perhaps these White
participants evaluated the suspect using their knowledge about the
social position that person presumably occupied. Given no other
information than the person's race, they judged that the African
American more likely came from a poor and dangerous neighborhood with
bad schools, and perhaps they felt that it was this background that
caused them to turn to crime. The White suspect, on the hand, would
be assumed to have come from a middle-class, "safe" environment, and
therefore the environment could not possibly have played a role in
the person turning to crime. In that kind of environment, then, only
a "bad apple" with peculiar, individual faults (like a lack of
self-control, which was the only attribution item to show a
significantly higher rating for the White suspect) could turn to
crime, since the social structure itself should work to the advantage
of the individual. Such a thought process leaves intact the social
structure from which it came, since it assumes that the norm, which
is an implicitly White one, is inherently good.
While it is certainly possible that peculiarities of the sample or
the method played a role in the unusual results found here, they
should also remind of us the potentially important role the social
norm plays in how we understand and process messages about
race. Whiteness could have important implications for how we
understand the cognitive processing of messages about race by Whites,
especially on the automatic or subconscious level. As more and more
messages about our increasingly diverse world get disseminated
through more and more media outlets, the assumptions of Whiteness
will come under increasing pressure. Therefore, increased
understanding of the mechanisms of processing messages about race,
and the role of media in the priming of those mechanisms, is
important if we seek to make positive changes.
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Table 1
One way analysis of variance of explanations for suspect's condition
by suspect's race
Race of suspect
How influential you think the following factors may have been in the
man's life? a
White
mean
(SD)
Black
mean
(SD)
F
df
Significance
Poverty
3.30
(1.58)
4.23
(1.57)
17.53
202
p < .001
Poor education
3.74
(1.63)
4.35
(1.71)
6.57
202
p = .01
Growing up in bad neighborhood
3.58
(1.67)
4.52
(1.71)
15.24
201
p < .001
Addiction
4.38
(1.31)
4.27
(1.71)
.23
199
n.s.
Poor parenting
4.16
(1.63)
4.34
(1.84)
.52
200
n.s.
Violent personality
5.11
(1.40)
4.83
(1.73)
1.52
201
n.s.
Laziness
3.09
(1.54)
3.04
(1.63)
.04
200
n.s.
Materialism
3.43
(1.55)
3.40
(1.64)
.01
201
n.s.
Dishonesty
4.52
(1.48)
4.19
(1.83)
1.83
200
n.s.
Lack of self-control
5.43
(1.39)
4.83
(1.79)
6.66
200
p = .01
Situational vs. personalityb
4.48
(1.08)
4.05
(1.21)
7.03
202
p < .01
Man's condition in life is due to his not trying hard enough
3.51
(1.36)
3.05
(1.59)
4.54
199
p < .05
Man's condition in life is due to past discrimination for being poor
and uneducated.
3.06
(1.43)
3.31
(1.71)
1.27
200
n.s.
Boldface indicates external attribution factors; regular typeface
indicates internal factors.
a Scored on a 7-point scale, with 1 = "not at all influential" and 7
= "very influential."
b Scored on a 7-point scale, with 1 = "situational factors only" and
7 = "personality factors only."
c Scored on a 7-point scale, with 1 = "strongly disagree" and 7 =
"strongly agree."
Table 2
Two way analysis of variance of prejudice level and suspect's race
on explanations for suspect's condition
Explanations for suspect's condition
External factors
Internal factors
Variables
Poor education
Growing up
In bad neighborhood
Poor parenting
Addiction
Materialism
Main effect of suspect race
F = 6.97
p < .01
F = 16.13
p < .001
F = .47
n.s.
F = .20
n.s.
F = .02
n.s.
White
3.74
3.59
4.18
4.39
3.44
Black
4.35
4.54
4.35
4.29
3.41
Main effect of prejudice level
F = 1.31
n.s.
F = 1.79
n.s.
F = .37
n.s.
F = 1.92
n.s
F = .06
n.s.
High
3.92
4.23
4.19
4.49
3.39
Low
4.19
3.91
4.34
4.19
3.45
Interaction between prejudice and suspect race
F = 2.86
p < .10
F = 5.66
p < .05
F = 3.99
p < .05
F = 5.82
p < .05
F = 3.44
p < .10
High and Black
4.70
4.98
4.52
4.70
3.65
High and White
3.68
3.47
3.85
4.28
3.26
Low and Black
4.03
4.10
4.17
3.88
3.17
Low and White
3.81
3.71
4.50
4.50
3.62
For all five dependent variables, df = 198
Note: Except where indicated, numbers represent means on a 7-point
scale, with 1 = "not at all influential" and 7 = "very influential."