Implicit race attitudes predict trustworthiness judgments and economic trust decisions

Stanley, Damian; Sokol‐Hessner, Peter; Banaji, Mahzarin R.; Phelps, Elizabeth A.

doi:10.1073/pnas.1014345108

Cited by 238 publications

(248 citation statements)

References 30 publications

(42 reference statements)

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“…As with other forms of implicit bias (23,30,31), the effect is not always limited to people who explicitly endorse traditional gender-trait beliefs. In experiments 4 and 5, we measured gendertrait beliefs and found that both those who affirmed and those who rejected the notion of differences in men's and women's warmth and aggressiveness based their evacuation intentions on the gendered names.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Female hurricanes are deadlier than male hurricanes

Castellano¹,

Castiello²,

Fanelli

et al. 2014

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

112

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Do people judge hurricane risks in the context of gender-based expectations? We use more than six decades of death rates from US hurricanes to show that feminine-named hurricanes cause significantly more deaths than do masculine-named hurricanes. Laboratory experiments indicate that this is because hurricane names lead to gender-based expectations about severity and this, in turn, guides respondents' preparedness to take protective action. This finding indicates an unfortunate and unintended consequence of the gendered naming of hurricanes, with important implications for policymakers, media practitioners, and the general public concerning hurricane communication and preparedness.gender stereotypes | implicit bias | risk perception | natural hazard communication | bounded rationality E stimates suggest that hurricanes kill more than 200 people in the United States annually, and severe hurricanes can cause fatalities in the thousands (1). As the global climate changes, the frequency and severity of such storms is expected to increase (2). However, motivating hurricane preparedness remains a major challenge for local and state authorities (3). Although natural hazards such as hurricanes represent both physical and social phenomena (4, 5), meteorologists and geoscientists point out that too little attention has been paid to findings from the social sciences about subjective risk perceptions (6, 7). Those findings highlight the importance of understanding how assessments of risk from threats in the environment are often influenced not only by environmental and social cues (8, 9), but also by irrelevant psychological factors (10-12).We demonstrate that a natural disaster can, merely by being symbolically associated with a given sex through its assigned name, be judged in ways congruent with the corresponding social roles and expectations of that sex (13-16). In particular, analyses of archival data on actual fatalities caused by hurricanes in the United States (1950States ( -2012 indicate that severe hurricanes with feminine names are associated with significantly higher death rates. An explanation for this unexpected finding is tested in six experiments. These experiments show that gender-congruent perceptions of intensity and strength are responsible for malenamed hurricanes being perceived as riskier and more intense than female-named hurricanes. These findings have important implications for hurricane preparedness and public safety.US hurricanes used to be given only female names, a practice that meteorologists of a different era considered appropriate due to such characteristics of hurricanes as unpredictability (17). This practice came to an end in the late 1970s with increasing societal awareness of sexism, and an alternating male-female naming system was adopted (17). Even though the gender of hurricanes is now preassigned and arbitrary, the question remains: do people judge hurricane risks in the context of gender-based expectations?Research shows that women and men are socialized to have different social ro...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Female hurricanes are deadlier than male hurricanes

Castellano¹,

Castiello²,

Fanelli

et al. 2014

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

112

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“…We think it is important to make the distinction here between using the implicit association test (IAT) for diagnostic purposes (e.g., to classify individuals as 'racist') and using the IAT for research purposes (i.e., to investigate a potential contributing factor to trust behavior in our study) (2). We emphatically agree with Krueger (1) that, in its current instantiation, the IAT should not be used for diagnostic purposes.…”

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confidence: 43%

“…We were motivated by evidence for a common neural substrate, but the fact that we found a correlation was not a foregone conclusion. We did not make the claim that one's IAT score was diagnostic of whether one was 'racist' in their trust behavior (2). Trust estimations are complex, and the evidence from our own study (2) and others suggested that they covaried with many factors, both explicit and implicit.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We did not make the claim that one's IAT score was diagnostic of whether one was 'racist' in their trust behavior (2). Trust estimations are complex, and the evidence from our own study (2) and others suggested that they covaried with many factors, both explicit and implicit. We showed that the extent to which trust estimations varied with respect to a partner's race can be predicted in part by their IAT scores-in addition to and independently of other factors (2).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Reply to Krueger: Good point, wrong paper

Stanley¹,

Sokol‐Hessner²,

Banaji³

et al. 2011

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…Stanley et al (1) closed with the causal claim that decisions are partly determined by processes lying outside of awareness and that this "may have a very real cost for individuals and society" (ref. 1, p. 5).…”

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confidence: 99%

Decision-theoretic perspective on racial mistrust

Krueger¹

2011

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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The work by Stanley et al. (1) reported these results. First, most respondents had pro-white scores on the implicit association test (IAT). Second, the target person's race did not affect ratings of trustworthiness (study 1) or investment decisions (study 2). Third, IAT scores predicted trust-related responses over participants.What does the correlation between the IAT and the racial trust disparity say about racism? Stanley et al. (1) closed with the causal claim that decisions are partly determined by processes lying outside of awareness and that this "may have a very real cost for individuals and society" (ref. 1, p. 5). The implied normative claim is that the correlation should be zero. An alternative view is that there is no normative implication if there is no discrimination at the group level. The reason is that group-level differences in means or proportions are conceptually distinct from correlations over cases (2).The research participants were equally likely to trust whites and blacks, whereas a majority showed an implicit pro-white attitude (1). This finding suggested that the bias lay with the attitude measure; it yielded more false positives (participants who were predicted to discriminate but who did not) than misses (participants who were predicted not to discriminate but who did) (1). One might argue that a pro-white IAT score is itself prima facie evidence of racism aside from prediction. This claim, however, is difficult to sustain, because it does not pass the so what criterion. Discrimination, by definition, becomes a problem when the person subjected to it is put at a disadvantage. The IAT by itself does not create disadvantage and therefore, can only be a predictor variable.To illustrate how bias in the distribution of IAT scores affects inferences about individuals, consider two examples with dichotomized data from a decision-theoretic perspective (3). If the probability of a pro-white attitude and the probability of pro-white discrimination are both 0.8 and if there is a moderate correlation between test and criterion (ϕ = 0.4), the positive predictive value (the probability that someone with a high IAT score is a racist) is 0.88. If, however, discrimination disappears (P = 0.5) and the correlation remains the same (ϕ = 0.4), the positive predictive value drops to 0.6. Now, the number of people falsely accused of racism will be 16 times as large as those bigots who are incorrectly exonerated by a negative test result. It is not clear whether false accusation of racism is a lesser evil than a missed accurate accusation. Arguably, scientists might want to protect the volunteers that they study from false accusations.

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Implicit race attitudes predict trustworthiness judgments and economic trust decisions

Cited by 238 publications

References 30 publications

Female hurricanes are deadlier than male hurricanes

Female hurricanes are deadlier than male hurricanes

Reply to Krueger: Good point, wrong paper

Decision-theoretic perspective on racial mistrust

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