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CHAPTER 11
Racial Stereotyping and Political Attitudes: The
View From Political Science
Mark Peffley and Jon Hurwitz
While political science has made effective use of research on the psychology
of stereotyping, psychology has not benefited from political science in the
same way. This chapter argues that the study of racial stereotypes can be
improved by a mutual effort on the part of political scientists and psychol-
ogists alike to better understand and apply the methods and perspectives
that dominate each discipline. Our discussion focuses on three principal
disciplinary contrasts. First, while psychology has typically been concerned
with the processes underlying stereotypes, political science has focused on
the collective sources and political consequences of stereotyping. Second,
while political science could benefit from more experimentation, psychol-
ogists should implement research designs to enhance the external validity of
their research. Finally, both disciplines are limited to the extent that they typ-
ically focus on the beliefs of the dominant group, and stereotyping research
would benefit from a greater emphasis on the beliefs of racial minorities.
INTRODUCTION
By their very nature, the chapters in this volume share the very simple
premise that the disciplines of psychology and political science share a sym-
biotic affinity. Within political science, students of political psychology have
reaped extraordinary benefits from the work produced in psychologists’ lab-
oratories, borrowing heavily from theories and research in social psychology.
In particular, political scientists have, in recent years, taken advantage of the
vast and ever-growing literature on stereotyping. In politics, decisions are
often based on evaluations of groups (e.g., Nelson & Kinder, 1996)—groups
that consist of members of a political party, a gender, a nation, a race, or an
ethnicity. Stereotyping of such groups, consequently, becomes an indispens-
able concept. Nowhere is this truer than in studies of racial stereotyping and
prejudice, one of the fastest growing areas of research in political psychology.
It is no accident, then, that the same names appear repeatedly among
the citation lists of political scientists studying mass behavior—names such
as Katz and Braly (1993), Allport (1958), Tajfel (1982), Devine (Devine,
247
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248 POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY OF DEMOCRATIC CITIZENSHIP
Monteith, Zuwerink, & Elliot, 1991), Hamilton (Hamilton & Sherman, 1994),
Fiske (Fiske 1998; Fiske, Cuddy, Glick, & Xu, 2002), and Judd (Judd, Park,
Ryan, Brauer, & Kraus, 1995). In fundamentally different ways, each of these
psychologists has expanded our understanding of the nature of stereotyping.
We shall argue below that stereotyping research in political science has
much to offer psychology as well. Quite obviously, the political realm offers
a vast applied domain for establishing the political import and “real-world”
relevance of theories, concepts, and measures developed by psychologists.
Our work is far more than mere applied psychology, however. Not only can
political science studies extend our knowledge of stereotypes in general—
particularly regarding their applicability, salience, and universality—but
political research can investigate a range of questions unlikely to be explored
in social psychology.
Despite the natural affinity that social psychology and political psychol-
ogy have enjoyed for the past several decades, the relationship is imperfect.
The most appropriate metaphor for this chapter, consequently, is that it is a
conceptual, albeit biased marriage counselor. For, in reality, many of us in
political science who exploit the stereotyping literature to better understand
political phenomena have come to the realization that the two disciplines
often think about and investigate stereotypes in quite different ways. For
the relationship to improve—that is, for the two disciplines to make increas-
ingly more profitable use of each other’s work, in our partial view—there
needs to be a greater appreciation of not only how the research interests
of political and social psychology intertwine, but also how they tend to
diverge.
One purpose of this chapter, therefore, is to inform psychologists of
the peculiar needs of political scientists so that we can better exploit their
work and so that they can better exploit ours. Although few psychologists
appear to be aware of the burgeoning work in political science, there is
much to be gained by considering research driven by different questions,
perspectives, and methodologies than those typically employed by social
psychologists. Accordingly, while we are strong proponents of political psy-
chologists becoming better trained in theories and methods of psychology,
we aim to show how being a good psychologist is insufficient for doing good
work in political science. Because mainstream research in social psychology
is limited in its ability to study the political dimensions of stereotyping, polit-
ical psychologists (and hopefully, social psychologists) need to be ready to
move beyond the methods and perspectives dominant in social psychology.
The arguments raised, and the research reviewed, in this chapter are offered
in the spirit of improved mutual understanding and, we hope, advancement
in both disciplines.
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Racial Stereotyping and Political Attitudes 249
Our argument below is offered in three related parts. The first is designed
to underscore the differing foci of the two disciplines and takes off from
the frequently offered distinction between stereotypes studied as individual-
level beliefs and stereotypes studied as collective beliefs. Stripped to its
essentials, our argument is that while psychologists have focused primarily
on the cognitive processes underlying stereotypes held by individuals, polit-
ical scientists are more concerned with studying the collective sources (e.g.,
media, political rhetoric) and political consequences (e.g., policy support
and voting behavior) of such beliefs. To make our point, we offer sev-
eral examples of research examining the connection between racial stereo-
types and whites’ support for policies such as welfare and crime control,
which are ostensibly race-neutral but which have, in fact, become heavily
“racialized.”
The second part is more methodological in nature and focuses on the
limitations of the laboratory setting—its subject pool, its isolation of vari-
ables, and its measures. Our point is that a near-exclusive reliance on a
single methodology—whether it be survey research in the case of political
science or laboratory experiments in psychology—limits the range of ques-
tions that can be investigated as well as the resulting knowledge base in a
given field. This is particularly true in the study of racial attitudes, which
requires a panoply of theoretical perspectives and methodological tools.
And even a cursory reading of the literature inevitably brings one to the
conclusion that not only should political scientists more often exploit the
benefits of experimental manipulation and random assignment to enhance
the internal validity of their findings, but psychologists should more often
implement procedures to enhance the external validity of their findings,
as well.
In the third and final section, we examine a problem with the study of
racial stereotypes common to both disciplines—the tendency to focus on the
beliefs of the dominant group—in this case, whites. In this regard, we find
Judd and Park’s (Chapter 9) recent focus on the different perspectives of
whites and African Americans to be a welcome departure from the usual
tendency to ignore the attitudes of the latter group. We attempt to extend
Judd and Park’s observations to the political domain by reviewing our most
recent work on blacks’ and whites’ beliefs about the fairness of the criminal
justice system.
We have focused this chapter around racial stereotypes, particularly
whites’ views about African Americans. We do so in full knowledge that our
observations are not fully generalizable to stereotypes and attitudes (e.g.,
prejudice) toward other groups (including blacks’ stereotypes of whites). In
our defense, the study of racial stereotypes comprises the bulk of political
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250 POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY OF DEMOCRATIC CITIZENSHIP
research on group images. The emphasis on racial images is also justified in
light of the fact that, historically, racial issues have been a powerfully divisive
element in American politics, affecting voting behavior, partisan alignments,
and trust in government (e.g., Carmines & Stimson, 1989; Kinder & Sanders,
1996). And few would reject the proposition that racial stereotypes help to
undergird and justify many white Americans’ stands on a variety of racial
and nonracial issues.
STEREOTYPE RESEARCH: INDIVIDUAL VERSUS
COLLECTIVE FOCI
It has become commonplace (e.g., Hamilton & Sherman, 1994; Stangor &
Schaller, 1996) to partition students of stereotyping into two distinct camps:
those who focus primarily on stereotypes at the individual level and those
whose major interest lays in stereotypes as collective belief systems. Accord-
ing to Stangor and Schaller (1996), “Individual approaches have not been
particularly concerned about stereotype consensus, focusing instead on the
meaning of the stereotype to the individual” (p. 5). Associated with the dom-
inant social cognitive tradition in social psychology (e.g., Fiske & Taylor,
1991), the individual approach is primarily concerned with delineating cog-
nitive processes that explain how individuals develop, maintain, and change
stereotypic beliefs.
To label the social cognitive focus as “micro-level” is clearly not meant
to belittle its extraordinary contributions to our understanding of the phe-
nomenon. It is, however, intended to suggest that much of this work is of
limited utility to those of us who analyze politics. Four characteristics of this
individual approach, in particular, warrant comment. While none of these
can be said to be diagnostic of all of the work on stereotyping produced by
social and cognitive psychologists, their prevalence in this body of work is
evident.
Attention to Collective Consequences of Stereotypes
In the first place, the stereotyping research in social psychology has tended to
focus on intrapersonal processes, such as memory, perceptions, and attribu-
tions, rather than on interpersonal interactions (Dovidio, Brigham, Johnson,
& Gaertner, 1996). Moreover, psychologists tend to show little concern for
the collective consequences of these beliefs. The primary influence of stereo-
types, as studied by psychologists, is their tendency to bias information
processing, with the general consequence being that stereotypes are found
to perpetuate themselves and to bias judgments and treatments of groups
and their members. Invariably, the types of responses of interest to psychol-
ogists are individual or interpersonal behaviors, such as helping behavior or
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Racial Stereotyping and Political Attitudes 251
discrimination in choosing members of a group. And, as Dovidio et al. (1996,
pp. 302–303) observe in reviewing the literature, studies that examine the
relationship between racial stereotypes and behavior (i.e., discrimination)
are extremely rare in psychology.
Political scientists, on the other hand, are far more interested in the collec-
tive consequences of stereotypic beliefs. How, if at all, do partisan, gender, or
racial stereotypes influence our willingness to support Democratic, female,
or African American candidates (e.g., Huddy & Terkildsen, 1993; Rahn, 1993;
Terkildsen, 1993)? To what degree do our stereotypes of foreign nations pre-
dispose us to behave belligerently toward those nations (e.g., Herrmann,
Voss, Schooler, & Ciarrochi, 1997; Hurwitz, Peffley, & Seligson, 1993)? And
in what ways are public attitudes on crime, welfare, affirmative action, and
other ostensibly “race neutral” policies conditioned by whites’ stereotypes of
African Americans (e.g., Gilens, 1999; Peffley, Hurwitz, & Sniderman, 1997)?
These are the types of questions most often raised.
It is presumptuous, of course, to expect those of one discipline to adopt
the concerns of those in another discipline. As such, we cannot criticize social
or cognitive psychologists for their inattention to collective consequences. At
the same time, we submit that social problems are due to collective behav-
iors, not merely due to individual beliefs or responses. The salience and
perniciousness of racial hostility in this country are not functions either
of the racial stereotypes that individuals hold or of isolated, interpersonal
acts of discrimination. Rather, they result from the heated policy debates
over the distribution of scarce resources—resources that are apportioned
through policies such as affirmative action, racial profiling, and poverty pro-
grams. In short, it does not matter whether an individual perceives African
Americans to be lazy. It matters a great deal, however, if this stereotype
translates into policy preferences that, intentionally or unintentionally, exac-
erbate the problems of inequality and discrimination. Our point, in short, is
that the micro-theoretical work on stereotyping is useful, but political scien-
tists often need to go beyond this work in establishing a connection between
stereotypes and collective or political consequences.1
1Consider, for instance, Allport’s (1958) contact hypothesis for reducing racial prejudice and
stereotyping, which holds that these beliefs are changed primarily through the acquisition
of new information through direct contact with members of the target group. Unfortunately,
however, contact has not been found to be sufficient for reducing prejudice and stereotyping
(see, e.g., Rothbart & John, 1992); to the contrary, it has produced only minimal changes in
these tenacious beliefs. By attempting to alter stereotypes, per se, rather than the discrimina-
tory behaviors that result from such stereotypes, Allport may have drastically overestimated
the importance of the beliefs, while simultaneously underestimating the importance of their
consequences.
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252 POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY OF DEMOCRATIC CITIZENSHIP
In fact, the vast majority of political studies of racial stereotyping have
been, first and foremost, investigations into the political impact of whites’
beliefs about African Americans. This work nicely illustrates the ability of
the micro-level social cognition perspective to provide a loose framework
for political analyses—albeit a framework that ultimately must be modified
when investigating the complexities of “real-world” political consequences.
On the one hand, the individual perspective common to psychological
research has been invaluable in alerting political analysts to the highly condi-
tional nature of the linkage between stereotypes and political responses—in
this case, policy attitudes. On the other hand, it is often up to political scien-
tists to identify the various conditions (outside the laboratory) that moderate
the connection between stereotypes and policy attitudes.
Viewed from one perspective, the empirical relationship between racial
stereotypes and political judgments is characterized by striking inconsisten-
cies, appearing in some settings but not at all (or only weakly) in others
(e.g., Bobo & Kluegel, 1993; Federico, 2004; Goren, 2003; Sniderman &
Carmines, 1997; Terkildsen, 1993). One solution to this puzzle lies in the sim-
ple recognition that people are not prisoners to their prior beliefs; rather,
stereotypes guide judgments only when the stereotype “fits” the judgment
at hand.
When stereotypes do fit, they are powerfully consequential. Based on
a series of survey experiments where the race and other characteristics
of the target (e.g., welfare recipients and criminal suspects) were manip-
ulated, we consistently find that whites who regard African Americans as
“lazy” and lacking in the work ethic are much more negative in their assess-
ments of welfare policy, particularly when they believe that most welfare
recipients are black (Peffley, Hurwitz, & Sniderman, 1997; see also Gilens,
1999). By the same token, we have determined that whites who perceive
African Americans to be “violent,” “short-tempered,” and the like are more
supportive of harsh and punitive anticrime policies.
There are, however, numerous “disconnects,” or instances in which racial
stereotypes play little role in driving individuals’ attitudes toward welfare
or crime policy. Even among whites who see “most blacks” as violent, for
example, such stereotypes only appear to influence crime policy attitudes
for black criminals described as committing violent crimes (e.g., carjacking
vs. embezzlement) and only for punitive (vs. preventive) policies (Hurwitz &
Peffley, 1997; Peffley & Hurwitz, 2002). When the crime, the criminal, or the
policy does not comport with the African American stereotype, such beliefs
have far less political impact.
Even more important for understanding the impact of stereotypes
are instances when individuals are supplied with individuating or
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Racial Stereotyping and Political Attitudes 253
counter-stereotypical information—that is, information about individuals
that conflicts with the stereotypes of the larger group. And we contend that
psychologists and political scientists explore the complexities of individu-
ation in quite different, and quite revealing, ways. In our earlier work, we
investigated how two groups of whites—those with negative and those with
positive views of blacks—react to welfare mothers and criminal suspects
where the race and work histories of the targets are randomly varied. For
example, in the welfare mother experiment, respondents were asked about
either a black or a white welfare mother who either had dropped out of high
school or had completed high school. And, in the “welfare policy” experi-
ment, respondents were asked whether they would favor a welfare program
where the recipients are either black or white (i.e., immigrants from Europe)
and were either described as “people who have trouble hanging onto a job”
or “people who have shown that they want to work” (see Sniderman &
Piazza, 1993, for a similar design).
For social psychologists, such a design is primarily a theoretical exercise
for assessing the power of stereotypes to assimilate discrepant informa-
tion according to either a top-down or a bottom-up processing strategy.
Our interest in posing this question, however, was distinctly political. By
describing black welfare recipients in a positive way (people who want to
work) to whites who think that blacks are lazy, is it possible to inhibit the
connection between their negative views of blacks and their opposition to
welfare? And for whites who reject negative stereotypes, if we ask them
about black welfare recipients who are stigmatized in some way (e.g., who
failed to complete high school or have had trouble hanging onto a job),
are their more positive views of blacks in the abstract mere window dress-
ing? Will they quickly abandon such positive views when confronted with
blacks who have been stigmatized as disinterested in finishing school or
working hard?
In these experiments, we found that whites with positive views of blacks
were, for the most part, remarkably consistent in their responses to black
targets, regardless of their described work histories. Thus, they did not aban-
don their positive views of blacks when confronted with blacks who have
been stigmatized as high school dropouts or in some other way. Whites
who stereotyped blacks as lazy, however, tended to evaluate the black wel-
fare recipient more harshly than similarly described white recipients, and
they did so both in the case of the black recipient who fit their expectations
(dropped out of high school, had trouble hanging onto a job) and when the
recipient was mildly discrepant from their expectations (had completed high
school). However, in the welfare policy experiment, when information about
the target is strongly discrepant from the stereotype—that is, when whites
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254 POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY OF DEMOCRATIC CITIZENSHIP
who think blacks are lazy are asked about welfare for blacks who want to
work—these whites tend to “bend over backwards” in supporting welfare
for African Americans who have characteristics that are clearly contrary to
their stereotypes of most blacks.
One strong implication of these findings is that counter-stereotypical
information may be used to short-circuit stereotypical thinking among
whites. By framing policies such as welfare in terms of exemplars that are
contrary to the stereotype, such as the hardworking black welfare mother, it
is possible to sever the connection between negative stereotypes and pol-
icy views. Similarly, Valentino, Hutchings, and White (2002) found that
by portraying positive images of African Americans in political ads, racial
stereotypes are not activated and therefore racial thinking does not influence
voting intentions after watching a televised political ad.
The conditional impact of stereotypes is also very much in evidence in
studies of voting behavior. In her experimental analysis, Terkildsen (1993)
asked some 350 participants (selected randomly from jury pools in Jefferson
County/Louisville, Kentucky) whether they would vote for a fictitious
gubernatorial candidate after reading campaign materials that included a
photograph of the candidate (former Republican Senator Edward Brookes
from Massachusetts) in which the candidate’s skin color was varied to depict
either a light-skinned or a dark-skinned black male. As expected, whites with
negative stereotypes of African Americans were more likely to vote for the
lighter than for the darker-complexioned candidate, but only among indi-
viduals who were low self-monitors (individuals who tend to act on their
own beliefs rather than on situational cues). High self-monitors, on the other
hand, due to their greater propensity to offer environmentally “appropri-
ate” responses, disingenuously reported being more likely to vote for the
dark than the light-skinned candidate (see also McDermott, 1998; Sigelman,
Sigelman, Walkosz, & Nitz, 1995).
Weaver (2005) used a similar, but more elaborate Internet-based sur-
vey experiment in which a nationally representative sample of whites
(N=2, 138) was shown the campaign literature of two opposing candidates
running for office in which the race and skin color of the candidates varied
across experimental groups, using morphing software to more realistically
construct candidates who varied in race and complexion but not physical
attractiveness. Weaver found a general tendency to vote against darker can-
didates, as well as strong evidence of partisan and gender asymmetries:
Republicans were much less likely to vote for a dark-skinned candidate, even
when he was described as a conservative, and men were less likely to vote
for a black candidate than a female. The pattern of results in these studies
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Racial Stereotyping and Political Attitudes 255
helps to explain the tendency for preelection polls to overestimate the sup-
port for black candidates among white voters compared with the vote totals
that actually materialize on election day. Apparently, many whites express
support for black candidates in surveys, but vote for someone else in the
privacy of the voting booth (Clymer, 1989; but see also Hopkins, 2008).
In summary, the individual perspective in psychology has been invalu-
able in alerting political scientists to the conditional effects of stereo-
types: stereotypes sometimes “matter” politically and sometimes they do
not. For the most part, it has been the domain of the political scientist
to identify the various real-world conditions that moderate the political
effects of stereotyping, isolating the conditions under which stereotypes
are less influential in shaping political judgments. More specifically, much
of the extant literature in political science has focused on the impor-
tance of counter-stereotypical information for undercutting stereotypic
thinking.
As we have argued, however, scholars from a social cognition perspec-
tive shortchange themselves by viewing this research in political science
merely as a branch of applied social psychology, for there is much that they
could learn from this literature. Most importantly, the conditional impor-
tance of stereotypes in the political sphere reveals a great deal about their
ability to absorb new information in a naturalistic and sometimes politically
charged environment. Surely, social psychologists—even those whose inter-
ests lie entirely with matters of cognitive process rather than with matters
of stereotype consequence—must have compelling interests in the degree to
which the political and social context of a judgment can undercut stereotypic
thinking.
Attention to Systemic Sources of Stereotypes
A second attribute of the individual-level approach is its inattention
to societal sources of stereotypes. As Stangor and Shaller (1996) argue,
“Whereas the individual approach has focused on how stereotypes are
learned through direct interaction with others, collective approaches con-
sider the ways that stereotypes are learned, transmitted, and changed
through indirect sources—information gained from parents, peers, teachers,
political ...leaders,andthemass media” (pp. 10–11, emphasis added). In fact,
in political science there has been a veritable explosion of research on the
impact of news coverage and political rhetoric on whites’ views about African
Americans.
Mass Media. Several studies have explored the tendency of the contempo-
rary mainstream media to activate and cultivate negative stereotypes about
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minorities. Of particular importance are recent studies that examine the way
news portrayals of welfare and crime tend to link such issues with African
Americans. Based on content analyses of news coverage of welfare, analysts
find that the news media tend to “racialize” welfare policy by disproportion-
ately using images of African Americans to accompany negative news stories
on poverty (e.g., Clawson & Trice, 2000; Entman & Rojecki, 2000; Gilens,
1999). Similarly, crime stories in local news broadcasts tend to overrepresent
violent crimes where the perpetrator is black in such a manner that highly
exaggerates the involvement of African Americans in criminal activities (e.g.,
Gilliam & Iyengar, 2000).
Judging from the available evidence, such racially biased imagery has
a pernicious effect: by creating the inaccurate impression that a majority of
welfare recipients are black, public support for welfare is diminished, and
negative stereotypes of African Americans as the “undeserving poor” are
reinforced (Avery & Peffley, 2003; Gilens, 1999). Crime attitudes are simi-
larly affected. Experimental evidence suggests that even a brief visual image
of a black male in a typical local news story on crime is powerful and suffi-
ciently familiar to activate viewers’ negative stereotypes of blacks, producing
racially biased evaluations of black criminal suspects (Peffley, Shields, &
Williams, 1996). In their innovative experimental studies, manipulating only
the skin color of a male perpetrator in a local news broadcast, Gilliam
and Iyengar and their associates (Gilliam & Iyengar, 2000; Gilliam, Iyengar,
Simon, & Wright, 1996) convincingly demonstrated that when the perpe-
trator was African American, more adult subjects endorsed punitive crime
policies and negative racial attitudes after watching the news broadcast. And
when no perpetrator was depicted, subjects—both white and black—were
much more likely to recall the perpetrator as being an African American.
Political Rhetoric. Given this backdrop, a number of studies have exam-
ined the use of racially “coded” political rhetoric by politicians who engage
such issues as welfare and crime to exploit whites’ racial prejudice and
activate racial thinking, without ever explicitly playing the “race card”
(Edsall & Edsall, 1991; Gilens, 1996; Glaser, 1996; Kinder & Sanders, 1996;
Mendelberg, 1997). Perhaps, the most notorious examples of racially coded
rhetoric are the infamous “Willie Horton” and “Turnstyle” television ads cre-
ated by Bush supporters in 1988, which paired nonracial narratives with
racial imagery to produce an “implicitly” racial message (Jamieson, 1992).
Not only were the ads effective in portraying Bush’s opponent as soft on
crime, but news about the ads primed racial attitudes in opinions about
various policies (Mendelberg, 2001). Using a creative experimental design,
Valentino, Hutchings, and White (2002) were able to determine that political
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Racial Stereotyping and Political Attitudes 257
ads with implicit racial messages (e.g., a nonracial narrative about govern-
ment spending paired with images of undeserving blacks) were much more
effective than explicit racial messages (e.g., the same narrative with posi-
tive images of whites alongside negative images of blacks) in priming racial
attitudes and, consequently, augmenting support for George W. Bush over
Al Gore. And finally, Gilliam and Iyengar (2000) and White (2007) show
that racial messages from the media and political elites influence blacks’
and whites’ political attitudes differently, presumably because they activate
different stereotypical beliefs and group identifications.
When it comes to investigating likely societal sources of racial stereo-
types, therefore, political scientists have been forced to look outside the
individual perspective in social psychology, often collaborating with, or bor-
rowing from, scholars in sociology and mass communications. A number
of interesting questions arise from this research that would be worthy of
study by analysts of either discipline. Given that social psychologists focus
primarily on direct experience with group members as a source of stereo-
types, while political scientists focus on group perceptions as conveyed by
the mass media, a natural question arises: Which is more powerful in shap-
ing images of African Americans and other groups? And what happens
when messages from these sources conflict? Moreover, to what extent do
different antecedents create stereotypes with different properties? Do such
beliefs vary systematically in terms of their strength, affect, and susceptibil-
ity to change? Are stereotypes arising from direct experience more likely to
constitute prejudice than, say, images that are products of the mass media?
While a few scholars have begun to investigate such questions (e.g., Gilliam,
Valentino, & Beckmann, 2002), much remains to be done.
Process Versus Content
We have argued above that the psychological literature is often of limited
utility to political scientists because of its strong emphasis on cognitive pro-
cess to the neglect of collective consequences and societal sources. We extend
this line of reasoning to a third issue typically ignored by psychologists:
content. While their laser beam focus on process—of stereotype acquisition,
perseverance, change, and structure—has been invaluable in developing a
unifying theoretical perspective for the study of stereotyping, it also seems
to have come at the expense of exploring what, precisely, composes these
beliefs.2
2In addition, even some psychologists have questioned whether, from a practical stand-
point, increasingly greater detail about cognitive processes yields a better understanding of
stereotyping (e.g., Stangor & Shaller, 1996).
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258 POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY OF DEMOCRATIC CITIZENSHIP
On occasion, process and content overlap, such as with the work on
subtyping (e.g., Devine & Baker, 1991). In this literature, scholars have
investigated the dimensional structure of stereotypes, finding that they can
subsume a wide variety of subtypes. Patricia Devine, for example, has found
that global stereotypes of African Americans often serve as umbrellas for
more specific subtypes such as “ghetto blacks,” “black businessmen,” and
“black athletes.”
More commonly, however, the content is of only secondary concern to
the analyst. Once again, we bring our interest in politics to the table. And
once again, we note the necessity of better understanding stereotypic content
because it is this content, particularly if widely shared, that gives stereo-
types their pernicious impact. Thus, while it is important to understand
how stereotypes persevere in the face of conflicting information, it is even
more valuable to understand of what, exactly, these stereotypes consist. For
to know that a majority of whites in earlier times perceived African Ameri-
cans to be genetically inferior and cognitively impaired would contribute to
our understanding of segregated schools in this country. By the same token,
when a series of reports in Scientific American concluded that these stereo-
types were waning in the 1950s and 1960s, we mistakenly concluded that
racial prejudice, itself, had begun to disappear. What we did not know, but
should have known, was that beliefs in genetic inferiority were merely being
replaced by other equally noxious racial stereotypes impugning the work
ethic and other traits of African Americans (Kinder & Sanders, 1996, chapter
five; Peffley, Hurwitz, & Sniderman, 1997).
More specifically, in our work, we have found that particular stereotyp-
ical traits tend to shape particular policies. As might be expected, whites’
views on whether African Americans are “lazy” have a greater impact on
their support for welfare, and their views on whether African Americans
are “violent” have a greater impact on their support for punitive crime
policies (Peffley et al., 1997). As Gilens (1999, p. 170) has argued in his
study of why (white) Americans hate welfare, one implication of the fact
that different stereotypes are not interchangeable is that whites’ stereo-
types of blacks do not simply reveal a global antipathy toward African
Americans.
Instead, whites’ perceptions that blacks lack commitment to the work
ethic represents a specific racial judgment that cannot be reduced to a
broad negative orientation toward blacks. While prejudice surely plays some
part in generating negative stereotypes of blacks, these different stereo-
types also reflect unique cognitive constructs that have different origins
(e.g., mass media) and different consequences for white Americans’ political
views.
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Racial Stereotyping and Political Attitudes 259
Stereotype Consensus
The importance of content leads naturally to our next point, which is that
stereotypes, to be malignant, must be shared and must be prevalent. It is
partly a function of the experimental methodologies employed—an issue
to which we will return in the next section—that psychologists have been
unable to estimate the national (or regional) parameters that would provide
clues as to the degree to which the stereotype has permeated the culture.
It is also, however, partly a function of priority: when the concern is with
process as opposed to content, charting stereotype usage necessarily takes a
backseat to understanding its operation. The microlevel work, consequently,
reveals little about the prevalence of stereotyping, either nationally or among
various subgroups in the population.
To political scientists, the only stereotypes that mean anything are stereo-
types that have a widespread impact on the treatment of various groups—
treatment either by the government through public policies or by other
individuals or groups in the form of acceptance or rejection and discrimi-
nation. It is, therefore, far more pernicious to find that majorities perceive
African Americans to be lazy or females to be weak than to find that these
beliefs are idiosyncratically and randomly distributed among only a handful
of individuals.
To find that over half of all voting-age whites in the early 1990s viewed
“most blacks” or “blacks in general” as “preferring to live off welfare,”
“lazy,” and “violence prone” demonstrates that despite marked improve-
ments in whites’ racial attitudes over the last several decades, deroga-
tory images of minorities remain commonplace (Peffley & Hurwitz, 1998;
Sigelman & Tuch, 1997). Our work, based on experimental designs embed-
ded in probability surveys (Hurwitz & Peffley, 1997; Peffley & Hurwitz, 1998;
Peffley, Hurwitz, & Sniderman, 1997), has thoroughly convinced us that
stereotypes that have permeated the society have a profound impact over
public policy debates. There is little doubt in our minds, consequently, that
when many individuals share common pejorative stereotypes of a minority
group, their collective images will influence aggregated policy preferences.
Indeed, the connection between racial stereotypes and public attitudes
toward policies such as welfare and crime control may be so strong that
even changes in the policy itself are ineffectual in deracializing such poli-
cies in the public mind. The case of welfare is most instructive because there
is no question that the policy changed dramatically in the late 1990s, when
welfare reform legislation limited lifetime benefits to just 5 years and work
requirements were imposed. Despite such dramatic changes, as well as a
post-reform news environment that was less likely to portray welfare recip-
ients as African Americans, Dyck and Hussey (2008) found no significant
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260 POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY OF DEMOCRATIC CITIZENSHIP
decrease in the strong association between whites’ opposition to welfare
spending and their stereotypes about blacks’ work ethic (see also Blinder,
2007). The authors conclude that the well-known tendency for racial stereo-
types to resist change means that information challenging the association
between race and welfare must be clear and pervasive, and neither condition
has been met in the post-reform environment.
In addition to shaping public policy, pervasively negative stereo-
types contribute to a hostile racial climate and doubtless fuel racial ten-
sions. Indeed, Sigelman and Tuch (1997) found African Americans’ “meta-
stereotypes” of whites—their views of the images that whites hold of
blacks—tend to be fairly accurate in gauging the extremely high percent-
age of whites who continue to hold negative images of blacks on a variety of
dimensions.
THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE LABORATORY: RESULTS,
MEASURES, AND THEORIES
It is the need to establish national and subgroup parameters for stereotyp-
ing that practically mandates our reliance on survey research as our primary
tool of analysis. Many of our reactions to the work done on stereotyping in
psychology, consequently, are focused on the methodology which, until rela-
tively recently, was a mystery for those outside of the experimental tradition.
Our purpose in this section is not to criticize the experimental approach,
which, in many respects, is essential for rigorously testing micro-level the-
ories of stereotyping as well as the effects of political communication (i.e.,
political rhetoric and news coverage) on stereotyping. There are by now
several influential works by political scientists extolling the virtues of exper-
iments in political research (e.g., Kinder & Palfrey, 1993; Sniderman & Grob,
1996). Indeed, the development of Computer Assisted Telephone Interview-
ing (CATI) and Internet-based survey experiments (such as Time-Sharing
Experiments for the Social Sciences [TESS], which enables survey researchers
to imbed increasingly elaborate experimental designs into cross-sectional
national surveys) has encouraged political scientists to move in an increas-
ingly experiment-based direction. Rather, our intention is to underscore the
differences between experiments and surveys and, more specifically, to note
the impact which the methods have on theories, results, and measures.
By now, the characterization of experimental psychology as the study
of the college sophomore has become a cliché. We do, of course, appreci-
ate the need to exploit available subject pools and, as well, appreciate the
impossibility of using probability samples and simultaneously achieving the
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Racial Stereotyping and Political Attitudes 261
high degrees of internal validity characteristic of laboratory experiments.
Nonetheless, we cannot help but wonder about the degree to which reliance
on college students affects the results of such investigations. While this com-
ment is anything but original, we maintain that subject bias is perhaps more
problematic in the study of social stereotyping than in many other foci of research.
Take, for example, some recent findings suggesting a positivity bias on
the part of white subjects in their perceptions and evaluations of African
Americans. In their study of discourse processing, Voss, Wiley, Ciarrochi,
Foltz, and Silfies (1996) found that “Black participants demonstrated a
same-race bias, whereas White participants. . .provided an other-race bias”
(p. 113) when judging the likely guilt of whites charged with murder-
ing blacks (and vice versa) in hypothetical text scenarios. Additionally,
Judd et al. (1995) found that “[African-American] participants manifested
the expected patterns of perceived group variability and ethnocentrism,
whereas [White Americans] did not” (p. 469). More specifically, they found
that black subjects judged outgroup members (i.e., whites) more negatively
than their own group, and, furthermore, saw whites more stereotypically
(i.e., more homogeneously). Quite curiously, however, white participants
demonstrated neither this negativity effect nor the outgroup homogeneity
effect.
While both Voss and Judd (and their colleagues) provide quite plausi-
ble interpretations of these findings, we must raise the possibility that such
surprising results (pertaining to white subjects) are at least partly the result
of the subject pool. Because the great majority of these participants are lib-
eral arts (as opposed to professional) college students, they may be assumed
to be disproportionately liberal and, in the cases cited above, non-southern.
Moreover, according to Sears (1988), the properties of college experimental
subjects are fairly well understood. He argues, for example, that the typical
17- to 19-year-old psychology student tends to have a relatively unformu-
lated sense of self, which often means that they “have less-crystallized social
and political attitudes than do older people” (p. 325). Sears also reports
a stronger need for peer approval (p. 323) among these individuals, and,
not surprisingly, a tendency to be easily influenced (p. 325). And finally, he
argues that “college students may be even less thoroughly tied to stable pri-
mary groups than are other late adolescents because they are more likely to
have become detached from the groups of their earlier life ...” (p. 329).
Taken together, these characteristics may yield a subject pool that is less
than representative of the racial predilections in America. At the risk of
exaggeration, it is reasonable to assume that the racial attitudes of younger,
more affluent, and more educated college students are more positive than
typically found in national probability samples. Moreover, whatever the
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262 POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY OF DEMOCRATIC CITIZENSHIP
backgrounds of college students, not only are they quite susceptible to
peer influence, but they find themselves living in one of the most liberal
cultural environments in the country, where the pressures for “political cor-
rectness” can be extraordinarily strong. With the kind of self-monitoring
and impression management that comes from (relatively liberal) peer influ-
ence, together with the relatively uncrystallized attitudes that students tend
to hold, it would not at all be surprising to learn that even somewhat
prejudiced individuals would exhibit the positivity bias reported in the
literature.
In sum, we can conceive of numerous reasons why the characteristics of
the subject pool would influence the results of stereotype analyses. But the
impact of the subject bias may be even more pervasive, possibly influenc-
ing both the research methods and, as well, the very theories constructed
to account for prejudice and stereotyping. In addition to the aforemen-
tioned characteristics, Sears (1988) also attaches the somewhat more obvious
attributes to college students of being highly educated, cognitively skilled,
and articulate. One of the luxuries of working with such subjects—a lux-
ury not shared by survey research analysts—is the ability to use relatively
complex and detailed textual scenarios and correspondingly complicated
measures of stereotypicality, including a dot task in which subjects place
stick-on dots to “indicate the relative numbers of group members who fall
at each point along a dimension” (Park, Ryan, & Judd, 1992). Subjects are
also asked to estimate percentages and make some detailed cognitive dis-
tinctions between members of particular groups. While such measures have
been thoroughly validated, and while they yield invaluable data, we sus-
pect that many participants from a more representative sample would have
a difficult time understanding the instructions.
And we can even imagine scenarios in which the subject bias affects
this work at the stage of theory development. Samuel Gaertner and John
Dovidio’s (1986) theory of aversive racism, for instance, asserts that, while
most individuals are socialized into a prejudiced culture, over time they
become more egalitarian and concerned with issues of fairness and justice
(also inherent in the culture). Aversive racists, cognizant of the discrimi-
nation that blacks have faced, generally prefer remedial policies such as
affirmative action. However, when a situation or an event threatens to make
the negative portion of the attitude salient, aversive racists are motivated
to repudiate these feelings from their self-image, and they vigorously try to
avoid acting wrongly on the basis of these feelings. In these situations, aver-
sive racists may overreact and amplify their positive behavior in ways that
would reaffirm their egalitarian convictions and their apparently nonracist
attitudes (p. 62).
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Racial Stereotyping and Political Attitudes 263
It seems quite unlikely that such a theory of human nature, based on
the understanding that individuals express liberal leanings that belie their
true (and substantially less egalitarian) beliefs, could have been formulated
in the absence of a subject pool with predominantly liberal beliefs, given
findings that, when measured unobtrusively, large numbers of Americans
exhibit symptoms of racial prejudice (Kuklinski, Cobb, & Gilens, 1997).
Because of these problems, political scientists who use lab experiments
often rely on relatively large and diverse nonprobability samples of (non–
college student) adult participants (e.g., Gilliam & Iyengar, 2000; Iyengar,
2002; Sigelman, Sigelman, Walkosz, & Nitz, 1995; Terkildsen, 1993; Valentino
et al., 2002) recruited by a variety of resourceful means (e.g., ads in local
newspapers, kiosks in shopping malls, random samples of jury pools, and
the Internet). While such studies are more costly in terms of time and money,
the external validity they purchase is essential in the study of racial attitudes.
Political scientists have also pioneered the development of CATI tech-
nology and Internet-based surveys, which combine the external validity of
surveys with the internal validity of experiments, dozens of which can be
embedded throughout a survey. While there are certainly limits to the kinds
of manipulations that can be performed in surveys, as compared to the labo-
ratory, survey experiments offer one reasonable compromise between what
often seems to be the mutually exclusive demands of internal and external
validity (see, e.g., Piazza, Sniderman, & Tetlock, 1989). And Internet-based
surveys greatly expand the richness and realism of stimulus materials that
can be randomly administered to a representative cross section of the Amer-
ican public. In our view, then, research that makes use of a wider range of
triangulating methods is likely to build a stronger foundation of knowledge
about stereotyping. The use of TESS by social psychologists anxious to test
their theories with representative adult samples is an extremely encouraging
development.
The Consequences of the Laboratory: The Sterility of the Context. Beyond the
subject pool, there is another characteristic of laboratory research on stereo-
typing that often reduces its utility in political analysis: in various ways,
the sterility of the experimental environment, at least on occasion, fails to
mimic conditions in the “real world,” and, more specifically, isolates the
phenomenon in question from its surrounding context. This is the issue
frequently referred to as “mundane realism.”
For one thing, an important assumption of the experimental method is
that control variables, even if known to be significant determinants of the
dependent variable, do not need to be incorporated into the statistical mod-
els because the practice of random subject assignment essentially guarantees
that such control variables will be randomly distributed across the treatment
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264 POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY OF DEMOCRATIC CITIZENSHIP
groups as well. It is, consequently, extremely rare to see discussions of socio-
demographic or potentially related attitudinal variables in this literature,
despite the known importance of these factors.
Quite frequently, however, these exogenous and moderating variables
are relevant for purposes of understanding the phenomenon in question
and ignoring them obscures some important consequences of the stereo-
types. Paul Sniderman and Edward Carmines (1997), for example, have
demonstrated that stereotypes do not have to be held by majorities, or
even large minorities, to matter politically. Instead, they can be noteworthy
if held by even small groups, provided that these groups are strategically
located. Even while negative racial stereotypes are found disproportionately
among Republicans in the United States, they are actually more consequen-
tial when held by a nontrivial number of Democrats. The reason, they argue,
is that Republicans (and conservatives) have sufficient ideological reasons
for opposing government assistance and affirmative action programs, so that
negative stereotypes of minorities do not add appreciably to explaining their
policy views.
However, for Democrats (and liberals)—individuals who are ideolog-
ically more comfortable with such policies—racial stereotypes have been
found to play a more pivotal role in moderating levels of policy support,
such that generally liberal individuals who accept negative racial stereotypes
are far less likely to support welfare and affirmative action policies than are
those who reject such negative images. The Democratic Party, as a result, has
been unable and unwilling to mobilize its members to advance such policies,
in large measure because of the prejudices of various groups within the party
(e.g., Southern Democrats; see Carmines & Layman, 1998). We offer this as
an illustration of how the practice of divorcing stereotypes from other beliefs
and socio-demographic characteristics of the individual can serve to obscure
their most important consequences.
It is also difficult to incorporate influences of the social context on racial
attitudes using laboratory experiments. To be sure, analysts can incorpo-
rate characteristics of the social context, one or two elements at a time, but
doing so is unlikely to mimic the natural setting where particular combina-
tions of contextual elements are of interest (e.g., a high percentage of African
Americans living in a majority-white, poor, rural setting). For this reason,
many political scientists interested in racial attitudes have supplemented
individual-level survey data with census data describing the social con-
text in which individuals live, based on the assumption that racial attitudes
are a product of both individual and contextual factors and the interaction
between the two (e.g., Soss, Langbein, & Metelko, 2003). For example, recent
work offers a variety of refinements to the “racial threat” hypothesis, which
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Racial Stereotyping and Political Attitudes 265
states that white racial animosity increases with the percentage of blacks
in a state, county, or metropolitan area (e.g., Blalock, 1967; Giles & Hertz,
1994; Huckfeldt & Kohfeld, 1989; Key, 1949/1984). The relationship has been
shown to be more powerful in rural than metropolitan areas (Voss 1996, 2001)
and to be stronger with regard to racial policy attitudes than to more global
racial attitudes, such as stereotypes and prejudice (Glaser, 1994; Oliver &
Mendelberg, 2001). While the aforementioned studies combine survey and
census data, others have used survey experiments to manipulate perceptions
of social context (Glaser, 2003). And finally, Gay’s (2006) recent study shows
how economic competition between racial groups can generate more hostil-
ity between groups than the relative size of the groups (as emphasized by the
racial threat hypothesis). In Los Angeles, communities where Latinos were
economically advantaged relative to their black neighbors, blacks were much
more likely to harbor negative stereotypes about Latinos and to view black
and Latino economic and political interests as incompatible.
There is, finally, the equally problematic practice of divorcing stereo-
types, and stereotype holders, of their historic properties in the laboratory.
As expressed by Judd et al. (1995):
A frequent criticism of the social cognition approach to stereotyping and prej-
udice is that it tends to examine stereotyping issues within the context of the
laboratory, focusing on stereotypes and groups that may have been artificially
created or that are easily manipulated. Accordingly.... social cognition work
has failed to deal with stereotyping and prejudice issues with groups that have
a long history of conflict or with groups whose members feel very strongly
about their group loyalties .... The obvious question to be asked.. .is whether
the cognitive mechanisms that are studied in the laboratory do have analogs in
intergroup relations for groups that have a long history of conflict and whose
group loyalties are strong (p. 460).
This concern, as we note below, has led Judd and his colleagues to
broaden their exploration to encompass stereotypic beliefs among members
of minority, as well as majority, groups.
In sum, the requirements of political science research dictate a more
diverse “grab-bag” of methods to investigate racial attitudes than laboratory
experiments, the dominant method in social psychology. For psychologists
to investigate similar topics, they should consider diversifying their port-
folio of available methods. At a minimum, social psychologists interested
in enhancing the mundane realism of their laboratory experiments should
look to more applied work in political science to identify those elements
of the social environment that need to be examined more closely and more
realistically in the lab.
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266 POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY OF DEMOCRATIC CITIZENSHIP
None of the above arguments should be interpreted as urging psychol-
ogists to abandon laboratory experiments. To the contrary, several political
psychologists studying the effects of political communications, for example,
have made the forceful argument that experiments are the best method for
examining the impact of political ads and news broadcasts (e.g., Iyengar
& Kinder, 1987; Valentino et al., 2002). And it would be hard to imagine
implementing some of the demanding laboratory experiments examining
racial bias in any mass survey (e.g., Eberhardt, Goff, Purdie, & Davies, 2004).
The general point, however, is that researchers in both disciplines need to
be acutely aware of the costs as well as the benefits of relying on a single
methodology.
THE VIEWS OF AFRICAN AMERICANS
To this point, we have underscored mainly the differences between disci-
plines in their approach to the study of stereotyping. One characteristic—
indeed, problem—with the study of racial stereotypes common to both dis-
ciplines is the tendency to focus on whites’ views of African Americans,
with little or no attention to the views of blacks. As Sigelman and Welch
(1991) noted a decade ago, “when we consider almost any controversial issue
relating to race, we find that a great deal is known about whites’ attitudes
but little is known about blacks’ ” (p. 2; see also Bobo, 1997). In the area of
stereotyping, for example, stereotype batteries typically include traits (e.g.,
intelligence and work ethic) that define whites’ views of blacks rather than
the other way around (e.g., to what extent are whites racist?). Naturally,
it is next to impossible to understand interracial conflict if African Ameri-
cans are conspicuously absent from studies of racial attitudes. Certainly a
good deal of conflict and misunderstanding between the races arises from
the different perspectives, beliefs and assumptions that each brings to the
perceptual table. Although some inroads have been made in restoring bal-
ance to research on stereotyping and prejudice,3too little is currently known
about the attitudes of African Americans.
For this reason, Judd and Park’s (Chapter 9) recent focus on the differ-
ent perspectives of whites and African Americans is a welcome addition to
the field. In a series of studies based on nonprobability samples, the authors
3In political science, see, for example, Bobo and Johnson (2004), Davis and Silver (2003), Gay
(2006), Gilliam and Iyengar (2000), Kinder and Sanders (1996), Sigelman and Welch (1991),
Welch, Sigelman, Bledsoe, and Combs (2001), and White (2007); in social psychology, see,
Monteith, Spicer, and Tooman (1998), Steele and Aronson (1995), and the collection in Swim
and Stangor (1998).
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found that while younger African American participants reported more
stereotypic views of both whites and blacks than did older respondents,
the racial stereotypes of younger whites were weaker and less extreme. The
authors suggest that these differences in stereotype strength may be tied to
broader ideological perspectives used by the two groups.
[Many younger] white Americans have largely adopted a “color-blind” ideol-
ogy, advocating that issues of race and ethnicity in our society are best dealt
with if one attempts to treat everyone as individuals, and that race and eth-
nicity should not make any difference in how people are treated....Many
young African-Americans are going in an ideologically very different direc-
tion, one that might be characterized as a “multicultural” ideological point of
view. They are being increasingly socialized to say that ethnicity does matter;
that people in our society are treated differently as a function of their race and
ethnic background ...( Judd & Park, Chapter 9, pp. xx) AQ1
Our most recent work (Hurwitz & Peffley, 2005; Peffley & Hurwitz, 2007)
suggests that such different perspectives have an experiential basis and,
more importantly, may have dramatic political consequences. In a national
survey of approximately 600 whites and 600 African Americans, we exam-
ined the antecedents and consequences of beliefs about the fairness of the
criminal justice system. A wide chasm was found to exist between the races
in their evaluations of the justice system: whereas most African Americans
believe that racial injustice and a more general lack of fairness pervades
the justice system, most whites view the justice system as equitable. What
gives rise to such different perspectives and how do they drive polarized
responses in the justice domain? Fairness beliefs are certainly tied to racial
stereotypes; for example, whites who rate blacks more negatively are much
more likely to view the justice system as fair and to believe that the sys-
tem treats blacks fairly. Beyond this, however, fairness judgments have an
important experiential basis, particularly among African Americans; blacks
who report being treated unfairly by the police are significantly more likely
to rate the justice system as unfair, whether the justice system is defined in
terms of the courts, the police, or the justice system in general.
Most importantly, general beliefs about the fairness of the justice sys-
tem were found to be highly consequential to the way whites and African
Americans interpret various scenarios designed to simulate controversies
over police brutality and racial profiling. Once again, we rely on several
survey experiments where we manipulate the race of the civilian target in
police brutality and drug search scenarios. After describing each scenario,
we ask respondents a variety of questions about their interpretations of
police behavior, such as: “Are the police likely to launch a fair investigation
of the brutality incident involving a (black/white) motorist?” and “Did the
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268 POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY OF DEMOCRATIC CITIZENSHIP
police conduct a fair search of (black/white) drug suspects?” White and
African American respondents reveal two distinct perceptual patterns in
reacting to the scenarios. Similar to Judd and Park’s studies, whites respond
as if they regard the justice system as essentially “color-blind,” paying lit-
tle attention to the race of the civilian. The majority of African Americans
who view the justice system as unfair, however, are highly suspicious of the
system when the police confront African American civilians.
In short, many whites, despite an undeniable history of actual racial dis-
crimination in the criminal justice system, appear to adhere steadfastly to
a color-blind perspective in their reactions to the scenarios. At the same
time, many African Americans seem quick to assume the worst motives on
the part of police involved in confrontations with blacks—assumptions that,
doubtless, are driven by the stereotypes they hold of the white majority in
control of the criminal justice system. These reactions doubtless contribute to
interracial tensions, as blacks see whites as insensitive and whites see blacks
as responding to a simple ingroup favoritism bias.
CONCLUSIONS
At the beginning of this chapter, we employed the metaphor of the concep-
tual marriage counselor, whose job is to improve the working relationship
between two disciplines—psychology and political science—that focus on a
common phenomenon but with fundamentally different perspectives, inter-
ests, theories, and certainly procedures. Our intention in introducing this
metaphor has been not only to underscore the nature of these differences
in quite specific terms but also, where appropriate, to underscore instances
where one discipline has learned (or might have learned) from the other. We
have, consequently, referred frequently to work done in political science that
has used, as its conceptual and theoretical underpinning, the literature from
psychology.
At the risk of playing the aggrieved spouse in the troubled marriage,
however, we are obliged to note that, due to the recent vintage of the work
in political science, most social psychologists appear unaware of relevant
scholarship in political science. We view this as unfortunate, in large measure
because we believe that psychologists could profit immensely by broadening
their sights to include some of this research and by expanding their attention
to the collective sources and consequences of stereotyping.
One important way that psychologists could benefit from political
research is to broaden their use of research methods that enhance their ability
to generalize beyond the laboratory setting. As we have argued, the steril-
ity of the laboratory and the inherent restrictions in the subject pool are
problematic, particularly in tandem, for the study of racial stereotyping. Not
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Racial Stereotyping and Political Attitudes 269
only should political scientists more often exploit the benefits of experimen-
tal manipulation and random assignment to enhance the internal validity of
their findings, but psychologists should more often implement procedures to
enhance the external validity of their findings, as well. Obviously, the near-
exclusive reliance on a single methodology—whether it be survey research
in the case of political science or laboratory experiments in psychology—
limits the range of questions that can be investigated as well as the resulting
knowledge base in a given field.
Beyond methodology, however, is the issue of the focus of stereotyp-
ing research in political science and social psychology. Compared with
political scientists, who could easily be faulted for being overly eclectic
in studying all sorts of issues that bear on the collective consequences of
stereotypes, psychologists have focused like a laser beam on the cognitive
processes underlying stereotypes, with only scant attention to important
issues of stereotype content, consensus, and political and societal conse-
quences. Much the same could be said for the study of the other end of
the causal string—that is, the antecedents of stereotyping. Political scientists
examine a variety of societal sources of racial stereotypes, while psychol-
ogists focus almost exclusively on direct interpersonal contact. While it
may be convenient to assume that stereotypes are generated from inter-
personal relations, stereotypes have multiple antecedents and the source
of the stereotype must, somehow, affect its properties. Thus, while a more
focused research agenda among psychologists contains important benefits—
for example, a “tighter,” more circumscribed theory of stereotyping—the
downside may be a narrow range of applicability of these theories.
As students of stereotyping, political scientists came late to the party,
thereby having the luxury of being able to draw on an immense and invalu-
able literature from psychology. This extant research has provided a vast
storehouse of knowledge, particularly germane to the cognitive processes by
which stereotypes affect the use of new information. While we do not argue
that psychologists should redirect their focus of study to matters of collective
consequence or the societal sources of stereotype acquisition, we do argue
that their work could be made far more careful and nuanced, and ultimately
richer, by becoming better informed of some of the research methods and
findings in other disciplines.
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