Why Some (Racial) Attitudes are More Susceptible to Misrepresentation Than Others

• In Event: 1284 - Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 17. White Perceptions of Race/Ethnicity and Migration

Abstract

Since the 1970s, White Americans have made uneven progress in their racial attitudes. On one hand, Whites today are less likely to openly espouse stereotypic beliefs about Blacks and more likely to support racial equality in principle. On the other, support for policies designed to achieve racial equality has stalled. According to one explanation, Whites’ abstract beliefs about race are subject to stronger social desirability bias, and hence misrepresentation, than their applied preferences. This paper examines racial attitudes items on the GSS (2004–2014) to evaluate this claim. Using the gap between responses to Black and White interviewers as a proxy for misrepresentation, I find that Whites’ responses to “abstract” items, including beliefs about Blacks’ intelligence, are more (not less) similar across interviewers than their responses to “applied” items, including those that capture modern/symbolic racism. Affirmative action is an exception: support for preferential hiring practices is fairly impervious to interviewer race. The findings not only run against prior speculation, they expose and challenge our assumption that the attitudes that are subject to the strongest normative pressures are necessarily those that people misrepresent most. Drawing on these findings, I extend current models of attitude expression by elaborating the role of multiple “publics” and perceived social penalties. The refined model yields several, testable predictions, most notably: the topics that are subject to the greatest misrepresentation are not simply those for which normative pressures are high, but those on which public disagreement is thought to be high as well.

Author

• Maria Abascal, Columbia University