Positive Prejudice: Does it Exist?

One of the interesting, yet complex social issues that reside in our society today is prejudice. Prejudice was the underlining theme to the Carver, Glass and Katz article, " Favorable Reactions of Blacks and the Handicapped: Positive Prejudice, Unconscious Denial, or Social Desirability?" Their approach of studying responses dealing with prejudice provides a simplistic breakdown of possible associated sympathy effects.

At the end of the introduction, Carver et al. concluded their thoughts with two hypotheses that tested social desirably with respect to the concept of sympathy effects. The authors felt that in during the study, participants could overreact to not wanting to seem prejudice and consequently overcompensate those feelings by presenting more favorable ratings. They also thought another possibility was that participants could not be fully aware of negative feelings towards toward the interviewee in the transcripts, but they may exhibit actual behavior that expresses how they feel. Participants could also do a reverse of the negative reactions and actually react more favorably to a particular interviewee than other social groups. With all three possibilities, their hypotheses attempted to sort through these scenarios and test them.

Carver et al. tested their hypotheses by taking ninety female undergraduate students in Texas and randomly assigning one of the three separate transcripts that contained negative identical descriptions of a male student to them. The actual conditions of these three transcripts were one of a black student, one of a non-stigmatized student (one without race or disability listed), and one of a handicapped student. Participants assigned to the control condition were simply asked to read the transcripts for themselves while the bogus pipeline condition participants were hooked up to a "fake" machine that supposedly measured their emotional state and were asked to predict what response the machine recorded from their reactions. All participants were asked to rate the interviewee in the transcript based on a 11-77 scale based on adjectives similar to intelligent versus non-intelligent with 77 being the highest score.

The authors' hypotheses were supported through their testing. Those that felt they had to make an impression of being a non-prejudice person predictably rated the black interviewee more favorably than the non-stigmatized interviewee and those that felt their answers would be seen or available rated blacks more negatively. The bogus pipeline had no effect on the handicapped interviewee.

Although this particular experiment was insightful, there are a few aspects of the study that could be improved. For example, when participants were hooked up to the "bogus" or "fake" machine and asked to not look forward, one would hope that the authors would take in consideration that some people just naturally look forward or up at the ceiling when thinking about something or when processing pieces of information they have just read or heard. The idea may seem a bit intimidating, but maybe a more controlled "machine" setting where the participant's head is secured into particular position (e.g. straight) would control the action of looking around as well as having the machine operator either hidden from the view of the participant, or wearing some kind of disguise. This would be for the natural tendency for people to want to look at something or do something when instructed not to. Another example of how to improve this study would be to take into consideration the female psyche and emotional response in contrast to males. A study could be conducted with just males instead of females or with a mixture of both sexes. A third improvement would be to make the bogus pipeline equipment as high tech and cutting edge as possible to hopefully further convince the participants of its "validity." This could possibly have a small effect on the responses of the participants. These three different possible improvements could produce more profound results.

There are some suggestions of how to expand this study. One suggestion entails repeating the study on an HBCU (historically black college/university) campus. I believe that this would introduce another variable in the situation where the participants are actually minorities and are a part of the ethnic group one of the interviewees belongs to. Another suggestion is to involve both males and females in the participant pool or even repeat the study with just male participants. Also, instead of varying the gender of the participants, the study could also vary the gender of the interviewee in the transcripts.

Would the sympathy effects reflect a gender bias based on the gender of the participant or the gender of the interviewee or both? How would the ethnicity of the participant affect the desirability or favorable ratings of the black interviewee? As racial tones and prejudice transforms in society, these concepts may also transform within different social groups and provide for a more interesting yet relevant expansion of the Carver et al. article.