Historical roots of implicit bias in slavery

Abstract

Implicit racial bias remains widespread, even among individuals who explicitly reject prejudice. One reason for the persistence of implicit bias may be that it is maintained through structural and historical inequalities that change slowly. We investigated the historical persistence of implicit bias by comparing modern implicit bias with the proportion of the population enslaved in those counties in 1860. Counties and states more dependent on slavery before the Civil War displayed higher levels of pro-White implicit bias today among White residents and less pro-White bias among Black residents. These associations remained significant after controlling for explicit bias. The association between slave populations and implicit bias was partially explained by measures of structural inequalities. Our results support an interpretation of implicit bias as the cognitive residue of past and present structural inequalities.

Toward the use of approach/avoidance tendencies as attitude measures: Individual‐ and group‐level variability of the ingroup bias

“…Indeed, even if we only recruited European Americans living in the US, participants were likely to come from states/cities having a non‐homogeneous cultural knowledge about African versus European Americans. In line with this idea, we know from previous work that there is meaningful variability in the racial bias due to cities and counties (Hehman, Flake, & Calanchini, ; Orchard & Price, ; Payne, Vuletich, & Brown‐Iannuzzi, ; Zerhouni, Rougier, & Muller, ). Any inter‐individual variability (or differences in inter‐individual variability between the VAAST and the IAT) could thus be explained by a variability in cultural exposure.…”

Interregional and intraregional variability of intergroup attitudes predict online hostility

“…Previous research therefore generally utilized this operationalization of explicit bias (e.g. Connor, Sarafidis, Zyphur, Keltner, & Chen, 2019; Hehman et al, 2018; Leitner et al, 2016a; Leitner et al, 2016b; Payne et al, 2019). The difference scores computed for each participant were subsequently used to compute two scores per county: the average local difference score (interpreted as regional bias) and the standard deviation of the local difference scores (interpreted as local disagreements in bias).…”

“…What factors lead to the local emergence of hostile online environments? Online hostility can emerge from current local events (Williams & Burnap, 2015) or local history (Payne, Vuletich, & Brown‐Iannuzzi, 2019). For example, Kaakinen, Oksanen, and Räsänen (2018) observed that the Paris terror attack from November 2015 was associated with a rise in fear and intergroup hostility among Finnish internet users, who related to the pre‐attack situation of their fellow Europeans (c.f., Oksanen et al, 2018).…”

“…Under threat, outgroup derogation appears to be a common strategy of regaining collective self‐esteem (Branscombe & Wann, 1994). Specifically, regional experiences of ingroup threat seem to elicit heightened aggression and negative intergroup emotions (Fischer, Haslam, & Smith, 2010; Huddy & Feldman, 2011), which can be locally engrained and passed on over generations if the eliciting event was impactful enough (Obschonka et al, 2018; Payne et al, 2019). Note that regional construct aggregates (here, intergroup attitudes and hostility) are interpreted as a psychological facet of regional culture (Kitayama, Ishii, Imada, Takemura, & Ramaswamy, 2006) and that neither their interpretations nor their intercorrelations can be generalized to the individual level (Rentfrow, 2010; Rentfrow, Gosling, & Potter, 2008).…”

Gender Essentialism and the Mental Representation of Transgender Women and Men: A Multimethod Investigation of Stereotype Content

“…For example, on average in the US, scientists are expected to be male (e.g., Miller, Nolla, Eagly, & Uttal, 2018) and Black men are expected to be dangerous (e.g., Oliver, 2003). Such stereotypes are transmitted in overt and implicit ways through the mass media and other forms of socialization; people can learn and reinforce them without meaning to do so (e.g., Arendt, 2013; Kohne et al, 2020;Lyons & Kashima, 2003;Payne, Vuletich, & Brown-Iannuzzi, 2019). Above and beyond positive or negative attitudes towards social groups (i.e., outgroup prejudice and ingroup preference), the descriptive content of cultural stereotypes affects how people are treated and dictates the specific forms of discrimination to which they are vulnerable (Bodenhausen et al, 1998).…”