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/ Health News / 2007 / September 2007 / September 25, 2007 Non-biased people less likely to form racial prejudices |
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Researchers investigating how some individuals are able to avoid prejudicial biases despite the pervasive human tendency to favour ones own group have found that non-biased people are less likely to form negative affective associations as compared to their biased counterparts.
Washington, September 25 : Researchers investigating how some individuals are able to avoid prejudicial biases despite the pervasive human tendency to favour one's own group have found that non-biased people are less likely to form negative affective associations as compared to their biased counterparts.
Robert Livingston of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and Brian Drwecki of the University of Wisconsin, who carried out the study, say that they performed implicit and explicit psychological tests on white college students, and found that only seven per cent of them did not show any racial bias.
During the study, the subjects were assigned to a task that repeatedly paired unfamiliar Chinese characters with pictures that evoked positive or negative emotions (e.g., puppies or snakes). The objective was to see whether unfamiliar Chinese characters could evoke emotions by simply being paired with pictures that evoked these emotions.
The researchers found that non-biased individuals were less likely than biased individuals to acquire negative affect toward characters that were paired with negative pictures, indicating that people who displayed less racial bias might be more resistant to the kinds of real-world conditioning that leads to racial bias.
According to the authors, the study suggests that "whether someone is prejudiced or not is linked to their cognitive propensity to resist negative affective conditioning."
They say that reducing prejudice may require more than simply adopting egalitarian values, and such a change may require reconditioning of the negative associations that people hold.
"Just as it is difficult to change visceral reactions to aversive foods (e.g., lima beans) through sheer force of will, it may also be difficult to change visceral attitudes toward racial groups by acknowledging that prejudice is wrong and wanting to change," Livingston said.
The authors believe that though negative affect cannot be reduced by reason alone, it may be reconditioned through positive interpersonal experiences or exposure to more positive images of Blacks in the media.
ANI
