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

314 Part Three Social Relations
In several American states,
Black motorists have
represented a minority of
the drivers and speeders on
interstate highways, yet they
have been most often stopped
and searched by state police
(Lamberth, 1998; Staples,
1999a, 1999b). In one New
Jersey Turnpike study, Blacks
made up 13.5 percent of the
car occupants, 15 percent of
the speeders, and 35 percent
of the drivers stopped.
FIGURE :: 9.2
Facing Prejudice
Where does the anger disappear?
Kurt Hugenberg and Galen
Bodenhausen showed university
students a movie of faces
morphing from angry to happy.
Those who had scored as most
prejudiced (on an implicit racial
attitudes test) perceived anger
lingering more in ambiguous
Black than White faces.
activities included being “Treasurer, Gay and Lesbian Alliance,” received
replies, as did 11.5 percent of those associated with a different left-seeming
group (“Treasurer, Progressive and Socialist Alliance”).
• In one analysis of traffic stops, African Americans and Latinos were four
times more likely than Whites to be searched, twice as likely to be arrested,
and three times more likely to be handcuffed and to have excessive force
used against them (Lichtblau, 2005).
Modern prejudice even appears as a race sensitivity that leads to exaggerated
reactions to isolated minority persons—overpraising their accomplishments, overcriticizing
their mistakes, and failing to warn Black students, as they would White
students, about potential academic difficulty (Crosby & Monin, 2007; Fiske, 1989;
Hart & Morry, 1997; Hass & others, 1991).
It also appears as patronization. For example, Kent Harber (1998) gave White
students at Stanford University a poorly written essay to evaluate. When the students
thought the writer was Black, they rated it higher than when they were led to
think the author was White, and they rarely offered harsh criticisms. The evaluators,
perhaps wanting to avoid the appearance of bias, patronized the Black essayists
with lower standards. Such “inflated praise and insufficient criticism” may hinder
minority student achievement, Harber noted. In follow-up research, Harber and his
colleagues (2010) found that Whites concerned about appearing biased not only rate
and comment more favorably on weak essays attributed to Black students, they also
recommend less time for skill development. To protect their own self-image as unprejudiced,
they bend over backward to give positive and unchallenging feedback.
AUTOMATIC PREJUDICE
How widespread are automatic prejudiced reactions to African Americans? Experiments
have shown such reactions in varied contexts. For example, in clever experiments
by Anthony Greenwald and his colleagues (1998, 2000), 9 in 10 White people
took longer to identify pleasant words (such as peace and paradise ) as “good” when
associated with Black rather than White faces. The participants consciously expressed
little or no prejudice; their bias was unconscious and unintended. Moreover, report
Kurt Hugenberg and Galen Bodenhausen (2003), the more strongly people exhibit such
implicit prejudice, the readier they are to perceive anger in Black faces ( Figure 9.2 ).
a. b. c. d.
i. j. k. l.