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Racism

Racism and other forms of prejudice have increasingly become a topic of interest to social scientists who study deception. This interest largely stems from the observation that blatant and explicit displays of prejudice, which were once commonplace, tend to occur rather infrequently in the modern world. Some have argued that this is evidence of a true decrease in racism over time. In contrast, others have argued that as societies have begun to espouse more egalitarian values, people have simply become less willing to divulge their true racial attitudes in such an obvious way.

Evidence from a variety of sources provides support for the latter view, indicating that modern racism is often intentionally masked in survey research through lies and deceit. Moreover, some people may actually be deceiving themselves about their true feelings when it comes to race. To combat these issues, psychologists have developed techniques for bypassing such deception and detecting implicit racial attitudes. The results of this research have revealed that while racism has become more covert in the present day, it is still very much alive and well despite frequent claims to the contrary.

Denial of Racism

Although white Americans have historically held negative attitudes toward blacks, survey research suggested that this bias had effectively disappeared by the end of the 20th century. Study after study found that white participants were rating blacks just as favorably as they did their own racial group. And it is not just white-black prejudice that has seemingly disappeared—most forms of race-based prejudice appear to have been waning in recent years. At the same time this was noted, however, studies looking at the association between race and behavior appeared to indicate that things had not changed one bit: whites were still providing preferential treatment to members of their own race and penalizing racial out-groups. Thus, despite claiming that they are not prejudiced, studies continue to find that whites are treating members of other races differently on everything from whom they would hire for a certain job to the severity of the punishment they would assign to a criminal offender.

As one particularly compelling laboratory example of this seeming duplicity, a classic study by Shirley Weitz found that the white participants who expressed the most favorable attitudes toward blacks on a survey actually demonstrated the least friendliness toward a black confederate in a subsequent interaction. For a real-world example demonstrating similar hypocrisy, consider the case of gubernatorial candidate Tom Bradley, the first African American mayor of Los Angeles, who ran for governor of California in 1982. Although a variety of public opinion polls showed that he held a significant lead going into the election, he wound up losing the race to a white candidate. Although the polls could have been wrong in that instance (just as they were in the infamous Dewey-Truman presidential contest of 1948), pollsters and social scientists have documented a number of other cases since then in which political polls have overestimated support for racial minority candidates. This phenomenon has since been dubbed the “Bradley effect.”

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