WASHINGTON — Across the United States, white Americans show subtle or “implicit” biases against blacks — biases they mostly don’t even realize they have. This has been established through lots of research, but it’s not perfectly uniform across the land. Whites in some states show more bias, overall, than in others.
That’s the takeaway from data compiled by Project Implicit, based on the scores of 1.5 million voluntary takers of the Implicit Association Test or IAT (which detects subtle or unconscious racial preferences). But we didn’t know why levels of uncontrolled bias are higher in the U.S. Southeast and East Coast, but not so much New England.
Dominic Packer, a psychologist at Lehigh University, has a surprising (and troubling) answer: Unconscious racial bias, he shows in a new analysis, is higher in U.S. states in which there is a higher ratio of black citizens to white citizens — or in other words, in which there are relatively more black people for every white person.
“These findings are inconsistent with any simple hypothesis that contact between members of different racial groups will lead to reduced bias,” wrote Packer in his analysis. However, he said, they are quite consistent with the idea that in states with more black citizens, whites may perceive “greater competition for political, cultural and economic resources” or “greater risk for cross-race crime.”
In a 2014 presentation, Project Implicit researchers had already suggested that this relationship might exist. Packer simply went further, seeking to uncover correlations between state level differences in IAT scores (for whites) and a number of sociological and demographic factors, which are known to vary by U.S. state. Factors that he considered included levels of income and income inequality, history as a slave-holding state, political ideology, and the ratio of white to black residents in the state.
Interestingly, the research found that how a state voted in 2008 — for Obama versus McCain — did not explain anything about the state’s average IAT score. There was simply no relationship to politics. However, other factors, like levels of income inequality and whether the state was once a slave-holding state, did correlate with implicit bias scores.
Since many of the factors listed above actually correlate with each other, raising questions as to which factor might be truly primary, Packer then took another step. That was to perform a statistical analysis — called a regression — that would seek to even more precisely define which variable is linked to the pattern of implicit racial bias.
The result was striking: The ratio of white to black residents in a given state explained over 50 percent of the variability in various states’ white participants’ Implicit Association Test scores. “That’s pretty big, for anything social scienc-y,” Packer said.
Or to state the result in a different way: “States where Whites outnumber Blacks substantially in the population have lower average IAT scores,” Packer wrote. “In contrast, states where Blacks make up proportionally more of the population have higher average IAT scores.”
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