White Adults’ Verbal and Nonverbal Responses to Discussing Racial Bias: The Role of Bias Awareness
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Bias awareness—concern about one's propensity to express bias—has been linked togreater recognition of racial bias, but prior work has relied largely on self-reports. We testedwhether bias awareness predicts observable, real-time responses to interpersonal racism. Whiteadults (N=123) viewed videos depicting White children engaging in blatant and subtle racismtoward Black peers and then discussed each incident. We coded verbal tentativeness, nonverbalconfidence, and color-conscious and colorblind racial ideology (CBRI) language. Bias awarenesspredicted greater behavioral confidence—fewer tentative words and more nonverbal confidence.Participants responded more confidently and used greater color-conscious and less CBRIlanguage toward blatant (vs. subtle) racism. Contrary to predictions, bias awareness did notpredict responses to subtle racism, only predicting reduced CBRI language in the blatantcondition. These findings suggest that bias awareness is associated with White individuals’confidence when discussing racism, though subtle racism is likely downplayed, even amongthose higher in bias awareness.
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Reduced inequalities
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7164479386