Study wonders: Do you understand racism?

William Atkins
Friday, 09 January 2009 21:04

Science - Health

Elizabeth Dunn, another author of the study, stated, "People often make inaccurate forecasts about how they would respond emotionally to negative events. They vastly overestimate how upset they would feel in bad situations such as hearing a racial slur."

She added, "One of the ways that people may stem the tide of negative emotions related to witnessing a racial slur is to re-construe the comment as a joke or as a harmless remark." [Washington Post]

U.S. psychologist Eliot R. Smith, who co-wrote a review of the experiment, stated “The failure of people to confront or do anything about racist comments is pretty widespread in the real world. People may feel uncomfortable if someone makes a remark like this, but it's rare they will actually confront them." [Bloomington Pantagraph]

The review of the experiment is found at the Science magazine’s article “Surprising Emotions,” which was written by Dr. Smith (Indiana University, Bloomington) and Dr. Diane M. Mackie (University of California, Santa Barbara).

The abstract to their review states, "The present research demonstrates that although people predicted that they would be very upset by a racist act, when people actually experienced this event they showed relatively little emotional distress."

"Furthermore, people overestimated the degree to which a racist comment would provoke social rejection of the racist."

Drs. Smith and Mackie conclude, "These findings suggest that racism may persevere in part because people who anticipate feeling upset and believe that they will take action may actually respond with indifference when faced with an act of racism."