What is the relationship between racism and social psychology?

Introduction

The social and psychological study of prejudice and discrimination, including prejudice and discrimination against African Americans, has a long history; the term “racism,” however, did not enter the language of social psychology until the publication of the Kerner Commission Report of 1968, which blamed all-pervasive “white racism” for widespread black rioting in American cities. While usually applied to black-white relations in the United States, the term is also sometimes used with regard to white Americans’ relations with other minority groups, such as Asians or Latinos, or to black-white relations outside the United States, for example, in Britain, Canada, or South Africa. Most of the studies and research on racism have focused on white racism against blacks in the United States.

Racism is seen by many social psychologists not as mere hatred but as a deep-rooted habit that is hard to change; hence, subvarieties of racism are distinguished. Psychoanalyst Joel Kovel, in his book White Racism: A Psychohistory (1970), distinguishes between dominative racism, the desire to oppress blacks, and aversive racism, the desire to avoid contact with blacks. Aversive racism, Samuel L. Gaertner and John Dovidio find, exists among those whites who pride themselves on being unprejudiced. David O. Sears, looking at whites’ voting behavior and their political opinions as expressed in survey responses, finds what he calls symbolic racism: a resentment of African Americans for making demands in the political realm that supposedly violate traditional American values. Social psychologist James M. Jones distinguishes three types of racism: individual racism, the prejudice and antiblack behavior deliberately manifested by individual whites; institutional racism, the social, economic, and political patterns that impersonally oppress blacks regardless of the prejudice or lack thereof of individuals; and cultural racism, the tendency of whites to ignore or to denigrate the special characteristics of black culture.

Where Dovidio and Gaertner find aversive racism, Irwin Katz finds ambivalence. Many whites, he argues, simultaneously see African Americans as disadvantaged (which creates sympathy) and as deviating from mainstream social norms (which creates antipathy). Such ambivalence, Katz contends, leads to exaggeratedly negative reactions to negative behaviors by an African American, but also to exaggeratedly positive reactions to positive behaviors by an African American. He calls this phenomenon ambivalence-induced behavior amplification.

The reasons suggested for individual racism are many. John Dollard, Neal E. Miller, and others, in Frustration and Aggression (1939), see prejudice as the scapegoating of minorities to provide a release for aggression in the face of frustration; in this view, outbursts of bigotry are a natural response to hard economic times. Muzafer and Carolyn Sherif, in Groups in Harmony and Tension (1953) and later works, see prejudice of all sorts as the result of competition between groups. Theodor Adorno and others, in The Authoritarian Personality (1950), view prejudice, whether directed against blacks or against Jews, as reflective of a supposedly fascist type of personality produced by authoritarian child-rearing practices. In Racially Separate or Together? (1971), Thomas F. Pettigrew shows that discriminatory behavior toward blacks, and the verbal expression of prejudices against them, can sometimes flow simply from a white’s desire to fit in with his or her social group. Finally, both prejudice and discrimination, many psychologists argue, are rooted in those human cognitive processes involved in the formation of stereotypes.

Racism and Stereotypes

Stereotypes are ideas, often rigidly held, concerning members of a group to which one does not belong. Social psychologists who follow the cognitive approach to the study of racism, such as David L. Hamilton, Walter G. Stephan, and Myron Rothbart, argue that racial stereotyping (the tendency of whites to see blacks in some roles and not in others) arises, like any other kind of stereotyping, from the need of every human being to create some sort of order out of his or her perceptions of the world. Although stereotypes are not entirely impervious to revision or even to shattering in the face of disconfirming instances, information related to a stereotype is more efficiently retained than information unrelated to it. Whites, it has been found, tend to judge blacks to be more homogeneous than they really are, while being more aware of differences within their own group: This is called the out-group homogeneity hypothesis. Whites who are guided by stereotypes may act in such a way as to bring out worse behavior in blacks than would otherwise occur, thus creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Why is stereotypical thinking on the part of whites about African Americans so hard to eliminate? The history of race relations in the United States deserves some of the blame. Some mistakes in reasoning common to the tolerant and the intolerant alike—such as the tendency to remember spectacular events and to think of them as occurring more frequently than is really the case (the availability heuristic)—also occur in whites’ judgments about members of minority groups. In addition, the social and occupational roles one fills may reinforce stereotypical thinking.

Pettigrew contends that attribution errors—mistakes in explaining the behavior of others—may have an important role to play in reinforcing racial stereotypes. The same behavioral act, Pettigrew argues, is interpreted differently by whites depending on the race of the actor. A positive act by a black might be ascribed to situational characteristics (for example, luck, affirmative action programs, or other circumstances beyond one’s control) and thus discounted; a positive act by a white might be ascribed to personality characteristics. Similarly, a negative act might be ascribed to situational characteristics in the case of a white, but to personality characteristics in the case of a black. The tendency of whites to view the greater extent of poverty among blacks as solely the result of lack of motivation can be seen as a form of attribution error.

Policy Guides

Institutional racism occurs when policies that are nonracial on their face have differential results for the two races. For example, a stiff educational requirement for a relatively unskilled job may effectively exclude blacks, whose educational preparation may be weaker, at least in part because of past racial discrimination. The policy of hiring friends and relatives of existing employees may also exclude blacks, if blacks have not historically worked in a particular business. In both cases, the effect is discriminatory even if the intent is not.

Somewhat connected with the concept of institutional racism is Pettigrew’s notion of conformity-induced prejudice and discrimination. A classic example is that of the precivil-rights-era southern United States, where urban restaurant owners, regardless of their personal feelings about blacks, refused them service out of deference to local norms. Another example is the case of the white factory worker who cooperates with black fellow workers on the job and in union activities but strenuously opposes blacks moving into his neighborhood; norms of tolerance are followed in one context, norms of discrimination in the other.

The concept of symbolic (sometimes called “modern”) racism, a form of covert prejudice said to be characteristic of political conservatives, arose from a series of questions designed to predict whether white Californians would vote against black political candidates. It has been used to explain opposition to school busing to achieve integration and support for the 1978 California referendum proposition for limiting taxes. John B. McConahay shows that white experimental subjects who score high on the modern racism scale, when faced with hypothetical black and white job candidates with identical credentials, are more likely than low scorers to give a much poorer rating to the black candidate’s résumé.

Aversive racism cannot be detected by surveys. Since aversive racists wish to maintain a nonprejudiced self-image, they neither admit to being prejudiced nor discriminate against blacks when social norms clearly forbid it; when the norms are ambiguous, however, they do discriminate. In a New York City experiment, professed liberals and professed conservatives both got telephone calls from individuals identifiable from their speech patterns as either black or white. At first, the caller said he had the wrong number; if the recipient of the call did not hang up, the caller then asked for help regarding a disabled car. Conservatives were less likely to offer help to the black, but liberals were more likely to hang up when they were told by the black that a wrong number had been called. In another experiment, white college students proved just as willing to accept help from a black partner as from a white one when the help was offered. When the subjects had to take the initiative, however, discomfort with the reversal of traditional roles showed up: More asked for help from the white partner than from the black one.

Both symbolic and aversive, but not dominative, racists manifest ambivalence in their attitudes toward blacks. Katz’s concept of ambivalence-induced behavior amplification has been tested in several experiments. In one experiment, white college student subjects were told to insult two individuals, one black and one white. After they had done so, they proved, when asked for assistance in a task later on, more willing to help the black they had insulted than the white person.

The effect of the availability heuristic in reinforcing stereotypes is seen in the case of a white who is mugged by a black criminal. If the victim knows no other blacks, he or she may well remember this one spectacular incident and forget the many blacks who are law-abiding. The effect of occupational roles in reinforcing stereotypes can be seen in the example of a white police officer who patrols a black slum neighborhood and jumps to the conclusion that all blacks are criminals.

Experiments on stereotyping indicate that white subjects remember the words or actions of a solo black in an otherwise all-white group better than they do the words or actions of one black in a group of several blacks. With a mixed group of speakers, some white and some black, white experimental subjects proved later to be more likely to confuse the identities of the black speakers than those of the white speakers, while remembering the race of the former. The self-fulfilling prophecy concept has been tested in experiments with white subjects interviewing supposed job candidates. The white subjects were more ill at ease and inarticulate interviewing a black candidate than in interviewing a white one; in turn, the black candidate was more ill at ease than the white one and made more errors.

Since most such experiments use college students as subjects, there is inevitably some doubt about their generalizability to the outside world. Nevertheless, it seems likely that the evidence from social psychology experiments of just how deeply rooted racial bias is among white Americans has played at least some role in leading governments to adopt affirmative action policies to secure fairer treatment of blacks and other minorities in hiring procedures.

History and Developments

Although the study of racism per se began with the racial crisis of the 1960s, the study of prejudice in general goes back much further; as early as the 1920s, Emory Bogardus
constructed a social distance scale measuring the degree of intimacy members of different racial and ethnic groups were willing to tolerate with one another. At first, psychologists tended to seek the roots of prejudice in the emotional makeup of the prejudiced individual rather than in the structure of society or in the general patterns of human cognition. For many years, the study of antiblack prejudice was subsumed under the study of prejudice in general; those biased against blacks were thought to be biased against other groups, such as Jews, as well.

In the years immediately following World War II, American social psychologists were optimistic about the possibilities for reducing or even eliminating racial and ethnic prejudices. Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality, and The Nature of Prejudice (1954), by Gordon Allport, reflect the climate of opinion of the time. Allport, whose view of prejudice represented a mixture of the psychoanalytic and cognitive approaches, used the term “racism” to signify the doctrines preached by negrophobe political demagogues; he did not see it as a deeply ingrained bad habit pervading the entire society. Pettigrew, who wrote about antiblack prejudice from the late 1950s on, cast doubt on the notion that there was a specific type of personality or pattern of child rearing associated with prejudice. Nevertheless, he long remained in the optimistic tradition, arguing that changing white people’s discriminatory behavior through the enactment of civil rights laws would ultimately change their prejudiced attitudes.

The more frequent use by social psychologists of the term “racism” from the late 1960s onward indicates a growing awareness that bias against blacks, a visible minority, might be harder to uproot than that directed against religious and ethnic minorities. Social psychologists studying racial prejudice shifted their research interest from the open and noisy bigotry most often found among political extremists (for example, the Ku Klux Klan) to the quiet, everyday prejudices of the average apolitical individual. Racial bias against blacks came to be seen as a central, rather than a peripheral, feature of American life.

Responses to surveys taken from the 1940s to the end of the 1970s indicated a steady decline in the percentage of white Americans willing to admit holding racist views. Yet in the 1970s, the sometimes violent white hostility to school busing for integration, and the continuing social and economic gap between black and white America, gave social psychologists reason to temper their earlier optimism. The contact hypothesis, the notion that contact between different racial groups would reduce prejudice, was subjected to greater skepticism and ever more careful qualification. Janet Schofield, in her field study of a desegregated junior high school, detected a persistence of racial divisions among the pupils; reviewing a number of such studies, Stephan similarly discerned a tendency toward increased interracial tension in schools following desegregation. The pessimism suggested by field studies among younger teenagers was confirmed by experiments conducted in the 1970s and 1980s on college students and adults; such studies demonstrated the existence, even among supposedly nonprejudiced people, of subtle racism and racial stereotyping.

Yet while social psychological experiments contribute to an understanding of the reasons for negative attitudes toward blacks by whites, and for discriminatory behavior toward blacks even by those whites who believe themselves to be tolerant, they do not by any means provide the complete answer to the riddle of racial prejudice and discrimination. Unlike many other topics in social psychology, racism has also been investigated by journalists, historians, economists, sociologists, political scientists, legal scholars, and even literary critics. The techniques of social psychology—surveys, controlled experiments, and field studies—provide only one window on this phenomenon.

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