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Do Theories of Implicit Race Bias Change Moral Judgments?

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Abstract

Recent research in social psychology suggests that people harbor “implicit race biases,” biases which can be unconscious or uncontrollable. Because awareness and control have traditionally been deemed necessary for the ascription of moral responsibility, implicit biases present a unique challenge: do we pardon discrimination based on implicit biases because of its unintentional nature, or do we punish discrimination regardless of how it comes about? The present experiments investigated the impact such theories have upon moral judgments about racial discrimination. The results show that different theories differ in their impact on moral judgments: when implicit biases are defined as unconscious, people hold the biased agent less morally responsible than when these biases are defined as automatic (i.e., difficult to control), or when no theory of implicit bias is provided.

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Notes

  1. To ensure that scenario (e.g., renting vs. grading vs. hiring) did not make a difference, we conducted a 3 × 3 ANOVA with scenario as one factor and theory condition as the second factor. In Experiment 1, there was neither a main effect of scenario, F(2, 83) = 1.32, p = .27, nor was there an interaction between scenario and theory condition, F(4, 83) = .83, p = .51. In Experiment 2, neither the main effect of scenario, F(2, 83) = 1.02, p = .36, nor the interaction was significant, F(4, 83) = .71, p = .59. The effects thus do not depend on the particular scenario used.

  2. We also investigated the interaction between theory condition and participant race for the subset of our study containing only African-American and Caucasian participants. There was a significant interaction between theory condition and participant race, F(2, 76) = 4.54, p = .01. Caucasian participants generally displayed the same pattern as the overall sample (F(2, 62) = 8.81, p < .001), with the unconscious condition eliciting lower responsibility judgments than the automatic (p = .09) and folk (p < .001) conditions. However, African-American participants only showed a marginal main effect of theory condition, F(2, 14) = 3.03, p = .08. This was driven by higher responsibility attributions in the automatic condition compared to the folk (p = .08) and unconscious (p = .19) conditions. Given the low number of African-American participants, these results should be interpreted with caution, especially because the effects of participant race did not replicate in Experiment 2. In Experiment 2, there was no interaction between theory condition and participant race, F(2, 78) = .13, p = .88.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported in part by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship awarded to C. Daryl Cameron. We thank Lawrence J. Sanna, Paul Miceli, and Lindsay Kennedy for helpful comments on this research. We also thank everyone involved in the UNC Social Psychology Organizational Research Group who provided useful feedback during presentation of this research.

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  1. Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Campus Box 3270, Chapel Hill, NC, 27599, USA

    C. Daryl Cameron & B. Keith Payne

  2. Program in Cognitive Science and Department of Philosophy, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    Joshua Knobe

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  1. C. Daryl Cameron
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Correspondence to C. Daryl Cameron.

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Cameron, C.D., Payne, B.K. & Knobe, J. Do Theories of Implicit Race Bias Change Moral Judgments?. Soc Just Res 23, 272–289 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-010-0118-z

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