Changing Racial Attitudes?

Researchers at Florida State University found some interesting results when studying racial bias towards African Americans in non-black students. Below you'll find the article, which I'd like you to read and comment on. Additionally--I'd like you to set aside 10 minutes so you can take the Implicit Association Test yourselves. Click on the link and scroll down to take the race test. You might want to take other tests as well. The test only measures attitudes towards white and black Americans--but I'd still like to hear about your results. Feel free to comment on either the test, your results, or both. Have fun!

www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-tc-nw-obama-studies-0823aug23,0,2982580.story
chicagotribune.com
Studies of racial attitudes grapple with Obama factor
After decades of exposure to all of those stereotypes -- the Aunt Jemimas and the gangsta rappers, the Willie Hortons and TV drug dealers -- this just wasn't supposed to be happening.
By Richard Fausset
Tribune Newspapers 
August 23, 2009
TALLAHASSEE, Fla.
The test results baffled Florida State University psychologist Ashby Plant. She checked and rechecked the figures. Something must be wrong, she told herself.

Plant and her colleagues had just administered a racial Implicit Association Test to 74 white college students. A common tool in psychology lab work, the test purports to measure the kinds of biases people may not admit, or even know, they harbor. It is one of the more troubling, and fascinating, realities in Plant's line of work that when the test is administered to whites, roughly 75 percent typically show some degree of anti-black bias.

But in this case, her subjects were displaying almost no bias against blacks. In fact, about 45 percent appeared to be favoring blacks over whites. "It made us stop dead in our tracks," she said. "I mean, this was unheard of."

It was spring 2008 -- a moment of mounting intensity in America's presidential race. It was also the moment when Plant found herself delving into a new subspecialty with few precedents in the social sciences.

Call it Obama Studies.

It is a line of inquiry pursued by a small group of researchers, most of them experts in the nature of bias and prejudice. Their goal is to bring some scientific rigor to vexing questions that continue to ricochet around American dining rooms, the kind that were only amplified this summer with the arrest of black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.: How are racial attitudes changing, if at all, in the age of the first black president?

Plant and her colleagues began speculating that their surprising numbers had something to do with candidate Barack Obama. Perhaps, they would write later in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, the students had been profoundly affected by repeated exposure to a man "whose qualities -- well-educated, motivated, articulate -- contradict the negative stereotypes of African-Americans."

So they began designing an experiment to test their hypothesis.

Serious scientific inquiry into the nature of prejudice largely has been the domain of social psychologists, who study the way people interact with, think about and influence one another.

The discipline tends to focus on big-picture questions ("What are the motivational sources of prejudice?") and hyper-specific biological observations (for example, the role of certain brain regions in race-based fear responses).

But with Obama's victory -- in a country where, 50 years ago, nearly half of white voters would not consider voting for a black candidate -- a number of researchers have turned their attention to the influence of one man.

Thus far, some of the most widely discussed test results have been contradictory. If there has been an "Obama effect" on racial consciousness, it's not clear yet what it is.

Ray Friedman, a management professor at Vanderbilt University, conducted studies that suggested exposure to Obama's convention speech and election helped black students close an achievement gap with whites on a verbal aptitude test.

But in another study, a New York University researcher found that thinking about Obama had no discernible effect on black students' test scores.

At Stanford University, researchers led by graduate student Daniel Effron found what might be called a reverse Obama effect. In their studies, white Obama supporters showed favoritism for whites over blacks in hypothetical situations -- perhaps because by supporting Obama, they felt bestowed with nonracist "moral credentials" that made them more comfortable siding with fellow whites.

Plant, 40, is white, and some of her memories growing up in Baltimore involve unpleasant encounters with the realities of race, like the awkwardness of watching a stereotype-riddled TV show with her black best friend.

Over the years as a social psychologist, she has corralled hundreds of undergraduates and other volunteers into various university psychology labs to be virtually plumbed and prodded.

Last year, she enthusiastically supported Obama for president although, she said, "having studied prejudice for so long, I have to admit that at times I doubted" a black man could win.

To determine if Obama had accounted for a true change of mind, Plant and her main collaborator, University of Wisconsin psychologist Patricia Devine, would have to overcome a problem that has shaped the course of their field more than any other in recent years: how to record people's racial attitudes when it has become taboo to openly voice prejudices.

One key tool is the Implicit Association Test. Plant and her team didn't think they could show that Obama was the sole cause of lower bias: It would be difficult to isolate his influence, given all the stimuli out in the world. But the researchers thought they might be able to at least show a correlation via a two-part test.

In the first part, 229 University of Wisconsin students, all nonblack, were given Implicit Association Tests and then asked, among other things, to list five thoughts that came to mind when they considered black people. Once again, the students, as a group, failed to show much anti-black bias.

Researchers then noted if the participants listed any "positive black exemplars" -- for instance, Obama, Martin Luther King Jr. or Rosa Parks. They found that students who listed a positive exemplar showed less bias on the test.

That alone was interesting, but was Obama the one reducing the bias scores? That required navigating around a big problem: "How do you know that somebody's thinking of Barack Obama when they're exposed to black people," said Plant, "without explicitly asking about Barack Obama?"

Their solution was to call in 79 nonblack students for an experiment at Florida State. They, too, were given an IAT. Separately, the researchers exposed them, subliminally, to the words "black" and "white" by flashing them on a computer screen for 55 milliseconds each. (The effectiveness of such subliminal "priming" in advertising remains in question, but psychologists have used it effectively to influence people's responses in lab settings for decades.)

The students then were shown a succession of letter groupings, some real words and some nonsense strings of letters, and asked to pick out the real ones. Some of the real words were crime-related. Other words were government related, such as "politician" or "president."

This exercise would test how quickly the students were able, when primed with the word "black," to pick out the positive, government-style words that were associated with Obama, as compared with the negative words.

The researchers compared the results of the subliminal exercise to the IAT results. In essence: Those who responded more quickly to government-related words when primed with the word "black" also showed less implicit prejudice.

The researchers concluded that Obama's rise seemed to have influenced "the underlying associations at least some people carry around in their minds about black people."

They also warned of drawing "overly strong conclusions," and, in fact, Brian Nosek, the University of Virginia researcher and psychologist who co-manages Project Implicit, said an analysis of 479,000 people tested online in recent months showed little evidence of changes in racial attitudes that can be attributed to Obama. Still, Nosek said he expects that the first black president will change Americans' deepest racial attitudes. "It's just that we don't know yet what those changes will be," he said.