Discrimination Against Blacks Linked To Dehumanization

Discrimination Against Blacks Linked To Dehumanization, Study Finds
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Crude historical depictions of African Americans as ape-like may have
disappeared from mainstream U.S. culture, but new research reveals that
many Americans subconsciously associate blacks with apes. (Credit: Image
courtesy of Stanford University)

ScienceDaily (Feb. 8, 2008) — Crude historical depictions of African
Americans as ape-like may have disappeared from mainstream U.S. culture,
but research presented in a new paper by psychologists at Stanford,
Pennsylvania State University and the University of California-Berkeley
reveals that many Americans subconsciously associate blacks with apes.

In addition, the findings show that society is more likely to condone
violence against black criminal suspects as a result of its broader
inability to accept African Americans as fully human, according to the
researchers.

Co-author Jennifer Eberhardt, a Stanford associate professor of
psychology who is black, said she was shocked by the results,
particularly since they involved subjects born after Jim Crow and the
civil rights movement. "This was actually some of the most depressing
work I have done," she said. "This shook me up. You have suspicions when
you do the work—intuitions—you have a hunch. But it was hard to prepare
for how strong [the black-ape association] was—how we were able to pick
it up every time."

The paper, "Not Yet Human: Implicit Knowledge, Historical Dehumanization
and Contemporary Consequences," is the result of a series of six
previously unpublished studies conducted by Eberhardt, Pennsylvania State
University psychologist Phillip Atiba Goff (the lead author and a former
student of Eberhardt's) and Matthew C. Jackson and Melissa J. Williams,
graduate students at Penn State and Berkeley, respectively. The paper is
scheduled to appear Feb. 7 in the Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, which is published by the American Psychological Association.

The research took place over six years at Stanford and Penn State under
Eberhardt's supervision. It involved mostly white male undergraduates. In
a series of studies that subliminally flashed black or white male faces
on a screen for a fraction of a second to "prime" the students,
researchers found subjects could identify blurry ape drawings much faster
after they were primed with black faces than with white faces.

The researchers consistently discovered a black-ape association even if
the young adults said they knew nothing about its historical
connotations. The connection was made only with African American faces;
the paper's third study failed to find an ape association with other
non-white groups, such as Asians. Despite such race-specific findings,
the researchers stressed that dehumanization and animal imagery have been
used for centuries to justify violence against many oppressed groups.

"Despite widespread opposition to racism, bias remains with us,"
Eberhardt said. "African Americans are still dehumanized; we're still
associated with apes in this country. That association can lead people to
endorse the beating of black suspects by police officers, and I think it
has lots of other consequences that we have yet to uncover."

Historical background

Scientific racism in the United States was graphically promoted in a
mid-19th-century book by Josiah C. Nott and George Robins Gliddon titled
Types of Mankind, which used misleading illustrations to suggest that
"Negroes" ranked between "Greeks" and chimpanzees. "When we have a
history like that in this country, I don't know how much of that goes
away completely, especially to the extent that we are still dealing with
severe racial inequality, which fuels and maintains those associations in
ways that people are unaware," Eberhardt said.

Although such grotesque characterizations of African Americans have
largely disappeared from mainstream U.S. society, Eberhardt noted that
science education could be partly responsible for reinforcing the view
that blacks are less evolved than whites. An iconic 1970 illustration,
"March of Progress," published in the Time-Life book Early Man, depicts
evolution beginning with a chimpanzee and ending with a white man. "It's
a legacy of our past that the endpoint of evolution is a white man,"
Eberhardt said. "I don't think it's intentional, but when people learn
about human evolution, they walk away with a notion that people of
African descent are closer to apes than people of European descent. When
people think of a civilized person, a white man comes to mind."

Consequences of socially endorsed violence

In the paper's fifth study, the researchers subliminally primed 115 white
male undergraduates with words associated with either apes (such as
"monkey," "chimp," "gorilla") or big cats (such as "lion," "tiger,"
"panther"). The latter was used as a control because both images are
associated with violence and Africa, Eberhardt said. The subjects then
watched a two-minute video clip, similar to the television program COPS,
depicting several police officers violently beating a man of undetermined
race. A mugshot of either a white or a black man was shown at the
beginning of the clip to indicate who was being beaten, with a
description conveying that, although described by his family as "a loving
husband and father," the suspect had a serious criminal record and may
have been high on drugs at the time of his arrest.

The students were then asked to rate how justified the beating was.
Participants who believed the suspect was white were no more likely to
condone the beating when they were primed with either ape or big cat
words, Eberhardt said. But those who thought the suspect was black were
more likely to justify the beating if they had been primed with ape words
than with big cat words. "Taken together, this suggests that implicit
knowledge of a Black-ape association led to marked differences in
participants' judgments of Black criminal suspects," the researchers
write.

According to the paper's authors, this link has devastating consequences
for African Americans because it "alters visual perception and attention,
and it increases endorsement of violence against black suspects." For
example, the paper's sixth study showed that in hundreds of news stories
from 1979 to 1999 in the Philadelphia Inquirer, African Americans
convicted of capital crimes were about four times more likely than whites
convicted of capital crimes to be described with ape-relevant language,
such as "barbaric," "beast," "brute," "savage" and "wild." "Those who are
implicitly portrayed as more ape-like in these articles are more likely
to be executed by the state than those who are not," the researchers
write.

The way forward

Despite the paper's findings, Eberhardt said she is optimistic about the
future. "This work isn't arguing that there hasn't been any progress made
or that we are living in the same society that existed in the 19th
century," she said. "We have made a lot of progress on race issues, but
we should recognize that racial bias isn't dead. We still need to be
aware of that and aware of all the different ways [racism] can affect us,
despite our intentions and motivations to be egalitarian. We still have
work to do."

For Eberhardt, two stories of race exist in America. "One is about the
disappearance of bias—that it's no longer with us," she said. "But the
other is about the transformation of bias. It's not the egregious bias
anymore, but it's modern bias, subtle bias." With both of these stories,
she said, there is an understanding that society has moved beyond the
historic battles centered around race. "We want to argue, with this work,
that there is one old race battle that we're still fighting," she said.
"That is the battle for blacks to be recognized as fully human."

This research was supported by a Stanford University Dean's Award to
Jennifer Eberhardt.

Adapted from materials provided by Stanford University.

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Title Not yet human: Implicit knowledge, historical dehumanization, and
contemporary consequences.
Author(s) Goff PA, Eberhardt JL, Williams MJ, Jackson MC
Institution Department of Psychology, Pennsylvania State University.
Source J Pers Soc Psychol 2008 Feb; 94(2):292-306.
Abstract Historical representations explicitly depicting Blacks as
apelike have largely disappeared in the United States, yet a mental
association between Blacks and apes remains. Here, the authors
demonstrate that U.S. citizens implicitly associate Blacks and apes. In a
series of laboratory studies, the authors reveal how this association
influences study participants' basic cognitive processes and
significantly alters their judgments in criminal justice contexts.
Specifically, this Black-ape association alters visual perception and
attention, and it increases endorsement of violence against Black
suspects. In an archival study of actual criminal cases, the authors show
that news articles written about Blacks who are convicted of capital
crimes are more likely to contain ape-relevant language than news
articles written about White convicts. Moreover, those who are implicitly
portrayed as more apelike in these articles are more likely to be
executed by the state than those who are not. The authors argue that
examining the subtle persistence of specific historical representations
such as these may not only enhance contemporary research on
dehumanization, stereotyping, and implicit processes but also highlight
common forms of discrimination that previously have gone unrecognized.
(PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved).
Language eng
Pub Type(s) Journal Article
PubMed ID 18211178

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author of "The Black Holocaust for Beginners"
Social Activism is not a hobby: it's a Lifestyle lasting a Lifetime
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