Pro-Black Political Opinions, Participation, and Stereotype Threat among African American College Students
Year: 2010
Type: preprint
Abstract: We investigate how implicit racial attitudes and stereotype threat affect Black students’ political opinions, political knowledge, and political participation. We use implicit reaction-time procedures to measure relational and evaluative associations (Craemer 2010) among 351 self-identified Black participants mainly from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). Relational associations indicate how closely a student identifies with African Americans as a group, while evaluative associations indicate whether the student associates positive or negative word meaning with the group. We manipulate stereotype threat (Steele & Aronson, 1995, 1998) by presenting an introductory screen either with an all-White research team (high-threat condition), an all-Black research team, or no team-picture at all (low-threat conditions). We find that relational and evaluative associations are uncorrelated: Significant pro-Black implicit group identification coexists with anti-Black evaluative association bias (we refer to this phenomenon as “double non-consciousness”). Implicit Black identification predicts pro-Black political opinions, political knowledge, and political participation. Powerful stereotype threat effects emerge among Black students with strong implicit Black group identification. They answer significantly fewer political knowledge questions correctly when the research team is all-White compared to when it is all-Black or when no picture is presented (p
Source: SSRN Electronic Journal
Institutions: University of Connecticut, Jackson State University
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W169609251