Chapter 9: Prejudice: Disliking Others (2947.0K) - Bad Request

an apparent Black accent who needs a message relayed). Likewise, when asked to
use electric shocks to “teach” a task, White people have given no more (if anything,
less) shock to a Black than to a White person—except when they were angered or
when the recipient couldn’t retaliate or know who did it (Crosby & others, 1980;
Rogers & Prentice-Dunn, 1981).
Thus, prejudiced attitudes and discriminatory behavior surface when they can
hide behind the screen of some other motive. In Australia, Britain, France, Germany,
and the Netherlands, blatant prejudice has been replaced by subtle prejudice (exaggerating
ethnic differences, feeling less admiration and affection for immigrant
minorities, rejecting them for supposedly nonracial reasons) (Pedersen & Walker,
1997; Tropp & Pettigrew, 2005a). Some researchers call such subtle prejudice “modern
racism” or “cultural racism.”
On paper-and-pencil questionnaires, Janet Swim and her co-researchers (1995,
1997) have found a subtle (“modern”) sexism that parallels subtle (“modern”) racism.
Both forms appear in denials of discrimination and in antagonism toward
efforts to promote equality (as in agreeing with a statement such as “Women are
getting too demanding in their push for equal rights”).
We can also detect bias in behavior:
• To test for possible labor market discrimination, M.I.T. researchers sent
5,000 résumés out in response to 1,300 varied employment ads (Bertrand &
Mullainathan, 2003). Applicants who were randomly assigned White names
(Emily, Greg) received one callback for every 10 résumés sent. Those given
Black names (Lakisha, Jamal) received one callback for every 15 résumés sent.
• Other experiments have submitted fictitious pairs of women’s resumes to 613
Austrian clerical openings, and pairs of men’s resumes to 1,714 Athens, Greece,
openings and 1,769 American job openings (Drydakis, 2009; Tilcsik, 2011;
Weichselbaumer, 2003). By random assignment, one applicant in each pair
acknowledged, among other activities, volunteering in a gay-lesbian organization.
In response, callbacks were much less likely to the gay-involved applicants.
In the American experiment, for example, 7.2 percent of applicants whose
Prejudice Chapter 9 313
Although prejudice dies last
in socially intimate contacts,
interracial marriage has
increased in most countries,
and 77 percent of Americans
now approve of “marriage
between Blacks and
Whites”—a sharp increase
from the 4 percent who
approved in 1958 (Carroll,
2007). Among 18- to 29-yearold
Whites, 88 percent
approve (Pew, 2010a). In 2008,
1 in 7 American marriages—
six times the 1960 rate—were
between people of differing
race or ethnicity (Pew, 2010b).