Implicit Stereotypes

592 Words3 Pages

In recent years, the media has reported on many instances of racial discrimination and hate crimes, from the Eric Garner case of police brutality to the nationwide outcry in Ferguson, Missouri. In today’s society, it is less socially desirable to exhibit overtly racist attitudes or behaviors, so people instead conceal these prejudices and attitudes by avoiding African-Americans as a whole, thereby participating in modern day racism. With such a racially charged culture, where political correctness and socially acceptable behavior is a daily expectation, do unconscious implicit racial preferences determine explicit personal attitudes and experiences towards Africa-Americans? Kent et al. (2011), from the Population Reference Bureau, concluded that nearly 50% of Americans under the age of 18 are minorities. Furthermore, they predicted that by 2030, the majority of citizens under 18 will be of color and by 2042, non-Caucasian citizens will be the new minority. This prediction is particularly problematic given America’s blatant preferences towards white Americans and prejudices against minorities. This study aimed to find a possible relationship between implicit associations and personal experience/explicit attitudes that could help explain the …show more content…

The goal of my study was to measure the correlation between implicit associations and explicit associations (personal background and racial attitudes). In this study, 25 participants completed both the Race IAT and a survey. The survey I conducted focused on what specific indicators might relate to deeper unconscious thoughts such as, familial influence, personal experience and overall attitudes. Based on Greenwald et al.’s study (2009) and Schmidt et al.’s (2010) study, I predicted that my study would show a weak positive correlation between the IAT and survey