September 11, 2014
On Tuesday, September 9, faculty and students alike piled into the Bradford Auditorium of the Kirner-Johnson building to listen to John F. Dovidio speak. Dovidio, the Carl Iver Hovland Professor of Psychology at Yale University, does research centered around issues of social power and social relations. His lecture, entitled “The Subtlety of Contemporary Racism: Implications for Intergroup Perceptions, Interaction, and Policy,” was the John Rybash Memorial Psychology Lecture for this year.
Dovidio opened by sharing that all human beings have both explicit and implicit attitudes. Explicit attitudes are those that we deliberately think about and report on (your response when a friend asks about your favorite class), while implicit attitudes are evaluations that occur outside of our conscious awareness and control (nervous tics and body language). “Our explicit and implicit biases permeate our everyday life,” he explained.
Throughout the lecture, Dovidio focused on the social psychology of prejudice and racism, in which explicit and implicit attitudes play a very significant role. Racism, he said, does not exist in the same form that it used to: it is subtle, less acceptable and often less intentional. Most white Americans believe that they are free of prejudice and hate, but, more often than not, they have subdued and indistinct biases somewhere within them, and these biases can be detected through careful measurement of implicit attitude.
Dovidio focused exclusively on the relationship between black people and white people in order to demonstrate the existence of modern prejudice. In his social experiments, he placed one white person and one black person into a room and gave them only one instruction: to converse with one another. He then watched the white conversationalist closely, recording and adding up any implicit signs of negativity displayed toward the black person throughout the duration of the conversation.
After the conversation ended, Dovidio inquired as to whether or not the white person thought that the conversation went well. The overwhelming majority of white people answered with a resounding yes. Alternately, when the black people were asked about the nature of the white person’s character, they were very likely to report that the human they had been talking with was distant, apprehensive or just generally unpleasant.
This would not make sense if it were not for implicit attitude. The conversation between the two may have been explicitly pure (free from argument or tension), but the implicit attitude of the white person could be detected via lack of eye contact, sweatiness, nervous movement or body position.
In Dovidio’s experiments, the black participant often gave more notice to those factors than the actual words exchanged. While 85 percent of the white participants explicitly reported that they did not believe themselves to be racist, the experiment results indicated that roughly 75 percent were actually showing clear signs of low-key racist activity.
In a congruent study between white doctors and black patients, Dovidio and his team had similar findings. Race discordant visits to the doctor are shorter, involve less positive affect and are less participatory than white doctor/white patient visits.
Fifty-seven percent of black people surveyed during that study said that discrimination occurs often or very often in interactions with white physicians. White physicians were often unaware of this, for the patients felt this way due to the physicians’ implicit attitudes. Though racism may not be expressed on the surface of modern society, Dovidio concluded, it is “just as insidious as old-fashioned racism.”
Is there anything that can be done to counter this sort of negative interaction due to ethnical difference? Dovidio says yes… sort of. To simply make people aware of the subtleties of modern racism is not enough, though.
When aware, white participants would often try too hard to conceal their implicit attitude, unwillingly displaying even more negative body language whilst doing so. The key, he explained, is to find a uniting factor in order for separate races to come together. For example, a team, club or other organization inclusive of all races is less likely to harbor the faint traces of underlying racist tendencies. “You have to create a new reality,” said the professor, “and people will adapt to that reality.”
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