Study wonders: Do you understand racism?

William Atkins
Friday, 09 January 2009 21:04

Science - Health

Canadian-U.S. psychologists suggest in a new study that a person’s reaction to an act of racism may not be what is predicted. They wonder if people really undertand their attitudes on racism and whether their actions are similar with their spoken words.


Kerry Kawakami and Francine Karmali, both from the Department of Psychology at York University (Toronto, Ontario, Canada); Elizabeth Dunn, from the Department of Psychology at the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, BC, Canada); and John F. Dovidio, from the Department of Psychology at Yale University (New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.A.) researched this topic and wrote about it in the Science magazine paper “Mispredicting Affective and Behavioral Responses to Racism.”

They begin the abstract of their paper by saying, “Contemporary race relations are marked by an apparent paradox: Overt prejudice is strongly condemned, yet acts of blatant racism still frequently occur.”

This racial inconsistency, according to the psychologists, is caused in part because people do not really understand “... how they would feel and behave after witnessing racism.”

Thus, they decided to show whether people are consistent or inconsistent in their racial beliefs and how they react when racism is thrust in front of them.

The researchers used 120 “non-black” college students from York University in Canada. They were recruited for a supposed psychology study.

Each student participant was sent to a room in preparation for the study. It contained a white person and a black person. Both persons were actors, but that fact was unknown to the study’s participants.

Half of the subjects participated in an actual scene that involved racism, which they did not think was part of the experiment. The other participants only read about this racial scene.

Page two continues the set-up of the experiment, along with comments from the authors.