While previous psychological studies have shown that racism, sexism and ageism tend to be universal, a new study led by Paul Verhaeghen, professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Psychology, found that works in the American culture, namely literature, movies, TV, radio and the Internet, may contribute to the problem by exhibiting the same stereotypes that society works so hard to snuff out.
“There’s one idea that people tend to associate black people with violence, women with weakness, or older people with forgetfulness — because they are prejudiced. But there’s another possibility that what’s in your head is not you, it’s the culture around you,” said Verhaeghen. “And so what you have is stuff you picked up from reading, television, radio and the Internet. And that’s the question we wanted to answer: are you indeed a racist, or are you just an American?”
So they gave their participants a questionnaire designed to rate the amount of prejudice (both negative and positive) they exhibited.
They also timed their subject’s response times to different types of word pairs. The first types were word pairs typically associated with stereotypes, like black-lazy, female-weak or old-lonely. They contrasted this with pairs of words that contain the same first word, but are not stereotypical pairings, like black-goofy, female-uptight, or old-playful. A third type were words that are highly related, but do not reflect stereotypes, like night-cool, or summer-sunny. Social psychologists believe that these very fast response times that people tend to exhibit for stereotypical pairs are a reflection of an unconscious, gut-level type of prejudice.
Read more here: Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist, but It May Not Be Your Fault