The Naked Ape
A Blog by Nathan Taylor
Nathan has a life-long interest in human behaviour and how this influences social dynamics. This interest has lead him to study human behaviour as understood by economics, psychology, personality and cognitive development theory. Nathan is currently the Senior Economist at the Chamber of Commerce and Industry Western Australia
| The Internal Racist Part 1 |
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Imagine you are walking through a major metropolitan city in the US. It is late at night, there is graffiti on the walls, broken windows and rubbish all around. You are alone until you hear footsteps. As you turn around ask yourself - who do you want to see? Such a situation prompted civil-rights leader Jesse Jackson to state: "There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to start thinking about robbery - then look around and see somebody white and to feel relieved." In the US there are strong social stereotypes connecting black men with violent crime. Very strong stereotypes that subtly influence peoples’ behaviour towards blacks. Yale psychologist John F. Dovidio conducted a study in 2002 of how implicit assumptions altered the behaviour of 40 white college students. These students were asked to chat with one black and then one white person while their interactions were secretly recorded. The study found that the student's explicit views about racism and equality (held by the rational part of the mind) determined their conscious behaviours, such as the friendliness of their conversation. However, their non-verbal signals, such as the amount of eye contact they made, were determined by the unconscious racism embedded in their implicit assumptions. The result was that whites and blacks came away from these conversations with very different impressions of how they had gone. The whites typically thought the interactions had gone well but the blacks, who picked up the nonverbal signals, thought that the whites were racists. As we discussed in Are you a Woman or an Asian? implicit assumptions can have a much more significant impact on behaviour and performance than merely being a poor conversationalist! What kind of hope is there for strong relationships to develop when one party is unaware of their cold and demeaning attitudes while they are very clear to the other person? References Dovidio, J. F., Gaertner S. L., and Kawakami, K., 2002, Implicit and Explicit Prejudice and Interracial Interaction, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Volume 82, Number 1, pages 62 68.                       |