Pervasive implicit hierarchies for race, religion, age revealed by study
As much as social
equality is advocated in the United States, a new study suggests that besides
evaluating their own race and religion most favorably, people share implicit
hierarchies for racial, religious, and age groups that may be different from
their conscious, explicit attitudes and values.
The study findings
appear in Psychological
Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
Axt and colleagues
analyzed data from hundreds of thousands of American participants who completed
online Brief Implicit Association Tests (BIAT) on race, religion, and age.
In the first task,
participants viewed a male or female face of a particular racial group as well
as positive words such as love,
pleasant, great, and wonderful, and
negative words such as hate,
unpleasant, awful, and terrible.
For each set, participants categorized the positive and negative words with
faces belonging to each racial group.
The idea behind the
BIAT is that people are quicker to categorize things with the same response
when they are associated more closely in memory, even if they consciously
reject that association. If a person has positive associations with a
particular racial group, for example, it should take less time to categorize
faces from that group together with positive words.
A person with negative associations,
on the other hand, would need more time to categorize faces from that group
together with positive words. Thus, the BIAT can uncover biases people may not
be conscious of and do not endorse.
Axt and colleagues
found that participants were most likely to prefer members of their own race.
Additionally, members of almost every racial group exhibited an implicit racial
hierarchy of positive evaluations: White, then Asian, then Black, then
Hispanic.
Likewise, people
favored their own religion. After their own group, participants' implicit
hierarchies usually placed Christianity next, followed by Judaism, Hinduism or
Buddhism (there were two versions of the test, with either Hinduism or Buddhism
as an option), and Islam.
Unlike race and
religion, however, people did not show a preference for members of their own
age group. Still, every age group demonstrated an implicit age-based hierarchy
with children at the top, followed by young adults, middle-aged adults, and,
finally, older adults.
Importantly, participants'
implicit associations differed from evaluations they made when asked to report
what they consciously thought of various racial, religious, and age groups.
The researchers offer
an explanation for the results:
"Our explicit,
conscious attitudes may be derived more from personal beliefs about others. At
the same time, implicit attitudes may arise both from our own identities as
well as from widely spread cultural beliefs or values," says Axt.
"While we may disagree with such cultural beliefs, these results
illustrate how they can nevertheless shape our minds."
According to Axt and
colleagues, the findings contribute to the debate over whether people prefer
their own groups, or if those on a lower social rung actually esteem
high-status groups as a justification for the way things are:
"Like many
scientific debates, our results suggest that the answer is 'both.'"
Story Source:
The above story is
based on materials provided by Association for
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Journal
Reference:
1.
J. R. Axt, C. R. Ebersole, B. A. Nosek. The Rules of Implicit
Evaluation by Race, Religion, and Age. Psychological Science, 2014;
DOI:10.1177/0956797614543801
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Psychological Science. "Pervasive implicit hierarchies for race, religion,
age revealed by study." Science Daily,
31 July 2014. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/07/140731102526.htm>.
