Measuring Racial Status Beliefs with Implicit Associations

Abstract

Status distinctions have important consequences for most aspects of life, including inequalities in wealth, segregation, and interaction patterns in small groups. Much work documents such inequalities, but the mechanisms producing them are less understood. In our 2019 ASR article, “Status Characteristics, Implicit Bias, and the Production of Racial Inequality,” we showed that a novel measure of implicit status beliefs explained some of the effect of race on social influence. The measure is based on an implicit association test (IAT) assessing the association between status and racial categories. In their comment, Bursell and Olsson (2020) assert that the IAT may be capturing evaluative bias, not status beliefs. Furthermore, Bursell and Olsson suggest our measure may work better for white compared to black participants. In this response, we review work in the sociology of culture and social psychology establishing the multidimensionality of cultural beliefs, and we present results from a new experiment, showing status and evaluations load on distinct underlying constructs. Results also show no racial differences in these measurement properties. We conclude with a discussion of ways to further refine the racial status IAT and the broader implications of this exchange.

An fsQCA Analysis of Qualified Immunity and Police Use of Force: An Applied Sociology Approach

“…This model suggests that police will kill civilians to ensure some groups maintain control over conflict, whether over material resources or race (Combs 2018; Fryer 2019; Melamed et al 2019; Paoline, Gau, and Terrill 2018, but see Bursell and Olsson 2020 and cf. Melamed et al 2020). Previous research suggests that in the United States, persons of color are overrepresented in fatal police–citizen encounters (Belvedere, Worrall, and Tibbetts 2005; Binder and Scharf 1980; Correll et al 2007; Edwards, Lee, and Esposito 2019; Kahn et al 2017; Menifield et al 2019; Nix et al 2017; Ross 2015; B.…”

Revision, Reclassification, and Refrigerators1

“…Therefore, we also draw on literature explicitly probing the question of persistence, or the lack of change in so-called "arbitrary traditions" (Jacobs and Campbell 1961;Zucker 1977). Finally, as we are interested in how individuals may change previous typifications, we build on work on high-order inferences, which explores the interplay between one's own judgement and "most people's" judgement (Correll et al 2017;Firat, Kwon, and Hitlin 2018;Melamed et al 2020;Ridgeway and Correll 2006). Drawing on this work, we hypothesize that whether feedback leads to reclassifying depends upon the level of consensus conveyed: is the feedback definitive or merely normative.…”