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Aversive racism is a social science scientific theory proposed by Samuel L. Gaertner & John F. Dovidio (1986), according to which negative evaluations of racial/ethnic minorities are realized by a persistent avoidance of interaction with other racial and ethnic groups. As opposed to traditional, overt racism, which is characterized by overt hatred for and discrimination against racial/ethnic minorities, aversive racism is characterized by more complex, ambivalence expressions and attitudes nonetheless with prejudicial views towards other races. (1986). 9780122214257, Academic Press. ISBN 9780122214257Crisp, R. J. & Turner, R. N. (2007). Essential Social Psychology. London: Sage. Aversive racism arises from unconscious personal beliefs taught during childhood. Subtle racist behaviors are usually targeted towards African Americans. Workplace discrimination is one of the best examples of aversive racism. Biased beliefs on how minorities act and think affect how individuals interact with minority members.
Aversive racism was coined by Joel Kovel to describe the subtle racial behaviors of any ethnic or racial group who rationalize their aversion to a particular group by appeal to rules or stereotypes (Dovidio & Gaertner, p. 62). People who behave in an aversively racist way may profess egalitarian beliefs, and will often deny their racially motivated behavior; nevertheless they may change their behavior when dealing with a member of a minority group. The motivation for the change is thought to be implicit or subconscious. Though Kovel coined the term, most of the research has been done by John F. Dovidio and Samuel L. Gaertner.
The passage of civil rights legislation and socially enforced taboos against explicit racism have served to inhibit direct outward expressions of prejudice against minorities over the last several decades. But forms of implicit racism including aversive racism, symbolic racism, and ambivalent prejudice, may have come to replace these overt expressions of prejudice. Research has not revealed a downward trend in implicit racism that would mirror the decline of explicit racism.
Furthermore, implicit racism, when explicit racism is absent or rare, raises new issues. When surveyed about their attitudes concerning the racial climate in America, black people and white people had largely different perceptions, with black people viewing racial discrimination as far more impactful on income and education disparities, and being far less satisfied in general with the treatment of minorities in America. One explanation for this is that because explicit racism is so much less prevalent, Whites no longer perceive directly the ways that prejudice leaves its mark on American society; minorities, on the other hand, still recognize or feel the implicit racism behind certain interracial interactions.
One of the most prevalent ways of assessing implicit racism is through response latency procedures, such as the implicit-association test (IAT). In an IAT measuring implicit racism, individuals will be shown images and asked to press the same key for an image of a black person and/or a word that indicates something good, and another key for an image of a white person or something bad. These pairs will also be tested in reverse order (one key for a white person or something good, another for a black person or something bad). The greater the disparity in reaction times and accuracy between the different pair groups, the greater implicit racism is measured in that individual. Though there has been significant academic and popular debate regarding its validity, reliability, and usefulness in assessing implicit bias.
Other ways of measuring implicit racism include physiological measures (such as tracking people's heart rates), memory tasks and indirect self-report measures. Collectively, these implicit attitude measures provide a strong means of identifying aversive racism. A truly non-prejudiced person will score well on both measures of explicit prejudice and implicit prejudice. An aversively racist person, but not a person who is overtly racist, will instead score low on measures of explicit prejudice, yet not on measures of implicit prejudice. (2025). 9780521832540, Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521832540
Dovidio and Gaertner showed evidence of aversive racism in the 1970s and 1980s with their field research. People from a list of conservative and liberal political parties in Brooklyn, New York was called by a "wrong number" caller, a confederate to the researcher, attempting to get hold of a Auto mechanic to come to help them with their broken-down car. The confederate called from a payphone and was out of change to make another call and asked the participant to make the call for them. The independent variable, or the variable the experimenter changed, was the dialect of the confederate to convince the participant that the "wrong number" caller was either white or black. It was also noted how many people just hung up the phone when they found it was a wrong number.
Conservatives were significantly less helpful to people perceived as black, helping out those perceived as white 92% of the time compared with 65% of the time for those perceived as black (Dovidio & Gaertner, p. 69). The liberals helped white people 85% of the time and black people 75% of the time (Dovidio & Gaertner, p. 69). However, people from the liberal party hung up prematurely on black people 19% versus 3% of the time for white people, while the conservatives prematurely hung up on 8% of black people and 5% of white people (Dovidio & Gaertner, p. 69).
A similar experiment conducted by Hodson, Dovidio, and Gaertner (2002) replicated similar findings in college admission decisions. Participants were separated into two groups depending on whether they scored high or low on a self-report measure of racial prejudice. They were then asked to evaluate a group of students for college admission. The students had either high SAT scores and strong high-school grades or only strong scores in one of the two categories. As expected, there was no bias in admission decisions when the student had strong grades combined with high SAT scores. The bias revealed itself only when students were only strong in one of these areas. In these cases, substantially more black students were rejected. Even more convincingly, prejudiced participants inconsistently reported to place more value on the particular score that the black students performed poorly in. When black students had moderate SAT scores, this was cited as a reason for their denial whereas when they had moderate grades and a higher SAT score, prejudiced participants reversed their values to support their discriminatory behavior. Minorities are at a disadvantage when taking standardized tests such as the GRE or SAT. Many minority students are impoverished and are not able to afford a proper education. Also, there is the matter that the experiences of minorities differs greatly from White Americans, which hurt the test scores of minorities. One study found that minority members lack the knowledge of being accepted to college or for a masters due to not having a family member that has been in the same situation. White Americans have the privilege of having more knowledge about getting accepted into higher education due to being more well off then minorities.
Of note is the fact that the study of white college students' assessments of applications was run at the same college in both 1989 and 1999, with little change found, and meta-analysis of 40 years worth of studies in the area has shown next to no improvement (Saucier, Miller, & Doucet, 2005). Because aversive racism is neither conscious nor blatantly apparent to others, it is able to survive largely unchallenged by societal pressure for egalitarianism. Thus, outgroups, particularly racial minorities, can be subject to disadvantageous selection processes.
Aversive racism still affects the workplace in today's modern society. A different take on racism has been observed known as unconscious racist bias. Workplace discrimination takes place due to racial beliefs that the majority share in society. For example, a lot of minority members are poor, but views that believe that all minorities are poor and uneducated is not respectable at all. African Americans are not looked upon favorable, which makes employment a bigger challenge than it already is. Media outlets portray African Americans with negative adjectives such as poor or incompetent. The constant negative representation of African Americans causes a division among what is true or subtle racism. However, when status and achievements are equal, race does not affect employment decisions for African Americans.
Studies of nonverbal cues have shown repeatedly that less conscious or vigilantly controlled displays of discomfort increase in aversively racist Whites when interacting with Blacks, even when a concerted effort is being made and the white participants reported liking the black participants. Dovidio et al. found that negative implicit attitudes were correlated with nonverbal cues of discomfort such as increased rates of blinking and decreased eye contact in interactions with blacks. Those observing the nonverbal cues may often receive very mixed messages. Consistent with this reasoning, Dovidio, Kawakami, and Gaertner (2002) found that racial majority and racial minority members often based their perceptions of interracial interactions on two different sources of information, with white people relying more on verbal behavior and black people more on nonverbal behaviors. In their experiment, black and white participants engaged in paired conversations and then provided their assessments of the interaction. Consistent with the aversive racism framework, black participants rated a white partner's friendliness as a function of their nonverbal behaviors and implicit attitudes while white participants rated their own friendliness based on the verbal content of their conversation. Thus, participants left the same interaction with differing perceptions.
The consequences of these restrictive circumstances may be problematic. In any workplace where a racial minority does significant work in teams, that work is at risk of being of lesser quality objectively than a white co-worker's. One substantial contributing factor may be that minority workers might often be working with a white co-worker where the tension or implicitly biased responses by that co-worker impacts their performance. The white co-workers, on the other hand, work predominantly with other white co-workers and may be unhindered by such interracial dynamics, allowing them to perform comparatively more efficiently.
Some research has directly supported this notion. In one study, people who scored nonprejudiced (low explicit and implicit racism scores) and as aversively racist people (low explicit but high implicit racism scores) were placed in either a hypocrisy or a control condition. Those in the hypocrisy condition were made to write about some time they had been unfair or prejudiced towards an Asian person, while those in the control group were not. They were then asked to make recommendations for funding to the Asian Students Association. Aversively racist participants in the hypocrisy group made much larger funding recommendations (the highest of any of the four groups, actually) than the aversively racist people in the control group. The nonprejudiced participants, on the other hand, displayed no significant difference in funding recommendations, whether they were in the hypocrisy group or the control group. In another study measuring the correction of implicit bias among aversively racist people, Green et al. examined physicians' treatment recommendations for blacks and whites. While aversively racist people typically recommended an aggressive treatment plan more often for white than for black patients, those who were made aware of the possibility that their implicit biases could be informing their treatment recommendations did not end up showing such a disparity in their treatment plans.
While all of the above-mentioned studies attempt to address the nonconscious process of implicit racism through conscious thought processes and self-awareness, others have sought to combat aversive racism through altering nonconscious processes. In the same way that implicit attitudes can be learned through sociocultural transmission, they can be "unlearned". By making individuals aware of the implicit biases affecting their behavior, they can take steps to control automatic negative associations that can lead to discriminatory behavior. A growing body of research has demonstrated that practice pairing minority racial out-groups with counter-stereotypic examples can reduce implicit forms of bias. Moskowitz, Salomon and Taylor found that people with egalitarian attitudes responded faster to egalitarian words after being shown an African-American face, relative to a white face. In later research, it was shown that when primed in such a way as to motivate egalitarian behaviors, stereotype-relevant reactions were slower, but notably, these reactions were recorded at speeds too fast to have been consciously controlled, indicating an implicit bias shift, rather than explicit.Moskowitz, G. B., & Ignarri, C. (forthcoming). Implicit goals and a proactive strategy of stereotype control. Personality and Social Psychology Compass.
One very interesting finding may have implied that aversive racism can be combated simply by eliminating the desire to employ the time- and energy-saving tactic of stereotyping. By priming and inducing participants' creativity, which causes people to avoid leaning on their energy-saving mental shortcuts, such as stereotyping, reduced participants' propensity to stereotype.
Finally, there is evidence to suggest that simply having a greater amount of intergroup contact is associated with less implicit intergroup bias.
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