Stereotypes and ethnocentrism: Diverging interethnic perceptions of African American and White American youth.

Abstract

Much recent work on stereotyping has dealt with groups that are either artificially created or that do not have an extensive history of conflict. The authors attempted to overcome this limitation by examining issues of perceived variability and ethnocentrism among samples of White American and African American youth. The goals were both to examine theoretical issues in stereotyping and to describe the current state of ethnic interrelations among young people. Four studies are reported. Throughout, the samples of African Americans demonstrate interethnic judgments that are consistent with existing work on stereotyping and ethnocentrism. White American students, however, reported judgements that replicate neither the out-group homogeneity effect nor ethnocentrism. Alternative explanations for this difference are considered, and the discussion focuses on differing views concerning the role of ethnic identity and diversity in our society.

Evidence for racial prejudice at the implicit level and its relationship with questionnaire measures.

“…We wanted to do so both to be able to assess the content of those implicit and spontaneous associations and to relate them to questionnaire measures of prejudice. These goals were motivated both by prior work suggesting the reduction or even absence of prejudice as measured by explicit questionnaires assessing White Americans' attitudes toward African Americans (e.g., Judd et al, 1995) and by conclusions reached in the literature concerning the dissociation between implicit responses and explicit questionnaire results (e.g., Devine, 1989).…”

“…After participants had completed the lexical-decision trials but before they completed the prejudice questionnaire, they were seated at the computer and taken through the task developed by and used in the Judd et al (1995) studies. Recall that this task asked participants whether positively and negatively valenced attributes could ever be true of the primed groups, Blacks and Whites, with the primed category presented supraliminally.…”

“…In fact, not only would such a task be useful to examine whether controlled responses are indeed uncorrelated with what is activated at the automatic level, but it would at the same time allow us to explore the issue of strategic manipulation of the responses in the Judd et al (1995) studies.…”

“…Likewise, Judd, Park, Ryan, Brauer, and Kraus (1995) reported a series of studies examining intergroup perceptions among African Americans and White Americans. In this work, African American participants consistently showed patterns of responses that are typical of intergroup judgments, demonstrating both out-group homogeneity effects (Park & Judd, 1990;Park & Rothbart, 1982) and ethnocentrism.…”

“…These target words, identified by their stereotypicality and their valence, are given in the lower portion of Figure 1. They were chosen on the basis of data reported by Judd et al (1995) and of an extensive review provided by Dovidio and Gaertner (1986) of studies using D. Katz and Braly's (1933) adjective checklist approach for the assessment of ethnic stereotypes. This set of 48 target words was fully crossed with all three prime types.…”