Abstract
Three preregistered studies investigated people’s judgments of whether someone with implicit racial bias is obligated to change their bias and to avoid discrimination based on that bias. Two studies showed that hierarchy-legitimizing ideologies—Belief in a Just World, Social Dominance Orientation, and political conservatism—predict lower obligation judgments. One study showed that hierarchy-legitimizing ideologies predicted greater protection of a potential discriminator; in another, they also predicted lower protection of a person who may be discriminated against. Lastly, one study showed that greater obligation judgments predicted greater blame of a person who discriminated based on implicit bias. Taken together, these four studies address how people’s ideologies relate to their obligation judgments for implicit racial bias and how those obligation judgments are related to blame for discrimination resulting from implicit racial bias.
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Notes
Studies 1, 2, and 3 were preregistered. Study 4 was not; it was an exploratory test of whether greater obligation judgments predict greater blame when a person discriminates due to implicit bias.
Some demographic variables were included that were not used or reported here, but are available in the online datasets.
A principal components factor analysis was conducted on the Study 2 data to test our conceptual reasoning for combining importance ratings into potential-discriminator protection and potential-discriminate protection. Two components with eigenvalues greater than 1 were extracted. A first component showed loadings ranging from 0.68 to 0.80 for all variables. The second component showed more varied loadings and reflected our predicted variable combinations. While burden and practicality for both obligations loaded positively from 0.34 to 0.50, foresight loaded negligibly at 0.03 and 0.06, and severity and likelihood loaded negatively, from −0.29 to −0.42. Reflecting our initial uncertainty about reduced harm, it loaded at −0.17 (obligation to avoid harm) and −0.11 (obligation to change bias) on the second component. A factor analysis of the Study 3 data showed similar loadings on two extracted components.
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported by Project Implicit. Kate Ratliff is a consultant with Project Implicit, Inc., a nonprofit organization that includes in its mission “to develop and deliver methods for investigating and applying phenomena of implicit social cognition, including especially phenomena of implicit bias based on age, race, gender or other factors.”
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Liz Redford and Kate A. Ratliff declare that they have no conflict of interest.
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Data and study materials are available at the project page on the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/zj8an/?view_only=14a60e3fb95d4c009660fca33968262c).
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Redford, L., Ratliff, K.A. Hierarchy-Legitimizing Ideologies Reduce Behavioral Obligations and Blame for Implicit Attitudes and Resulting Discrimination. Soc Just Res 29, 159–185 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-016-0260-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-016-0260-3