Aversive Racism - Consequences

Consequences

Because aversive "racists" endorse egalitarian values, their biases do not manifest in situations where there are clear social norms of right and wrong. To discriminate in such situations would compromise their egalitarian beliefs. In these situations, aversive racists are motivated to avoid actions that could be associated with racist intent. Instead, aversive racists may discriminate in situations in which the guidelines for appropriate social behavior are unclear, when the basis for decision making is vague, or when their actions can be justified or rationalized on the basis of some factor other than race. In these situations, their unconscious thoughts and feelings may contribute to discriminatory behavior. A wide variety of empirical research supports the effects of nonconscious prejudice on aversive racists' behavior. These studies include experiments in emergency and nonemergency helping behaviors, selection decisions in employment and college decisions, interpersonal judgments, and policy and legal decisions.

Selection Decisions in Employment and Admissions:

Aversive racism can have serious implications for selection decisions. According to the Aversive Racism framework, discrimination should occur in situations in which decision can be ostensibly be based on factors other than race. Dovidio and Gaertner (2000) created just such a condition. College students were asked to make hiring recommendations for a campus position. In the first condition, one candidate was clearly more qualified than the other. In the second condition, candidates' credentials were more evenly matched with no clear optimal choice. As expected, the first condition revealed no racial bias. Participants consistently chose the more qualified candidate. However in the latter condition, as predicted, participants recommended the white candidate over the black in substantially more cases. Even in the face of similar credentials, participants ostensibly justified their discrimination on the grounds of other, non-racial factors. A similar experiment conducted by Hodson, Dovidio, and Gaertner (2002) replicated similar findings in college admission decisions. Participants were separated into two groups depending on whether they scored high or low on a self-report measure of racial prejudice. They were then asked to evaluate a group of students for college admission. The students had either high SAT scores and strong highschool grades or only strong scores in one of the two categories. As expected, there was no bias in admission decisions when the student had strong grades combined with high SAT scores. The bias revealed itself only when students were only strong in one of these areas. In these cases, substantially more black students were rejected. Even more convincingly, prejudiced participants inconsistently reported to place more value on the particular score that the black students performed poorly in. When black students had moderate SAT scores, this was cited as a reason for their denial whereas when they had moderate grades and a higher SAT score, prejudiced participants reversed their values to support their discriminatory behavior. Of note is the fact that the study of white college students' assessments of applications was run at the same college in both 1989 and 1999, with little change found, and meta-analysis of 40 years worth of studies in the area has shown next to no improvement (Saucier, Miller, & Doucet, 2005). Because aversive racism is neither conscious nor blatantly apparent to others, it is able to survive largely unchallenged by societal pressure for egalitarianism. Thus, outgroups, particularly racial minorities, can be subject to disadvantageous selection processes.

Legal Decisions:

Aversive racism may have similar negative implications for bias in legal decisions. Johnson and colleagues examined the effects of introducing damaging inadmissible evidence on the judgments of white jurors. The race of the defendant was manipulated to be either black or white. When exposed to only admissible evidence, jurors were not affected by the race of the defendant and perceived both whites and blacks as equally guilty. The researchers demonstrated that, when exposed to incriminating evidence that the court deems inadmissible, white jurors found black defendants more guilty, but showed no similar effect on their judgments of white defendants. Consistent with the non-racial justifications given by participants in Gaertner and Dovidio's (2000) study, the participants in this study claimed to be less affected by the inadmissible evidence in the scenario where the defendant was black than when the defendant was white, displaying once again the subconscious nature of this racial discrimination.

Interaction:

Because of the subtle and varied nature of these biases, aversive racism not only systematically influences decision making but can also fundamentally impact everyday social relations in ways that contribute substantially to misunderstandings and mistrust in intergroup relations. Studies of nonverbal cues have shown repeatedly that less conscious or vigilantly controlled displays of discomfort increase in aversively racist Whites when interacting with Blacks, even when a concerted effort is being made and the white participants reported liking the black participants. Dovidio et al. found that negative implicit attitudes where correlated with nonverbal cues of discomfort such as increased rates of blinking and decreased eye contact in interactions with blacks. Those observing the nonverbal cues may often receive very mixed messages. Consistent with this reasoning, Dovidio, Kawakami, and Gaertner (2002) found that racial majority and racial minority members often based their perceptions of interracial interactions on two different sources of information, with Whites relying more on verbal behavior and Blacks more on nonverbal behaviors. In their experiment, Black and White participants engaged in paired conversations and then provided their assessments of the interaction. Consistent with the aversive racism framework, Black participants rated their White partner's friendliness as a function of their nonverbal behaviors and implicit attitudes while white participants rated their own friendliness based on the verbal content of their conversation. Thus, participants left the same interaction with differing impressions of the outcome.

Teamwork:

Understandably, with the negative effects of aversive racism on interracial interaction, interracial teamwork can suffer greatly from aversive racism. The discomfort detected through subtle, nonverbal cues that goes unaddressed openly can easily cause distrust between two individuals. When these individuals are members of the same team, or office, or project it can result in less effective communication and strained relations. This, of course, can drastically decrease the quality of work produced by the team. In one study reported by Dovidio et al. (2002), when paired together on a problem-solving task, teams consisting of a black participant and a non-prejudiced white participant did much better than those with a black participant and an aversively racist white participant. Surprisingly, however, teams with an overtly prejudiced white participant and a black participant showed greater efficiency on the task than teams that included an aversively racist white participant. Theoretically, the mixed messages and impressions in interaction made these teams less effective.

The consequences of these restrictive circumstances may be problematic. In any workplace where a racial minority does significant work in teams, that work is at risk of being of lesser quality objectively than a white co-worker's. One substantial contributing factor may be that minority workers might often be working with a white co-worker where the tension or implicitly biased responses by that co-worker impacts their performance. The white co-workers, on the other hand, work predominantly with other white co-workers and may be unhindered by such interracial dynamics, allowing them to perform comparatively more efficiently.