【英语时差8,16】种族类型及记忆

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Although there has been much debate about whether race has a biological or social basis, the bottom line is that race is a psychological reality for many people. That is, many folks assign other individuals to racial categories based on their appearance, and then make assumptions about them.   But racial stereotyping¹ goes beyond classifying people into groups. When a group is assigned a negative stereotype², individuals that exhibit more of the physical characteristics identified with that group suffer more discrimination.

For example, in a recent study, participants were asked to read one of four news articles about a hypothetical African American man. The first story was about a professor receiving an award. The second was about an athlete, a role stereotypically³ linked to African Americans. The third was about a white-collar criminal and the fourth about a violent criminal. No matter which story they read, all participants saw the same photo of the man.

Despite that fact, when participants were asked to reconstruct the man's face on a computer, they gave the man more stereotypically African features, such as darker skin tones, if he had been portrayed⁵ negatively as the white collar criminal, or--especially--as the violent criminal.

The fact that they didn't associate more African features with the athlete, who was portrayed positively⁶, suggests the participants linked these features to negativity rather than stereotypes⁷. And this happened regardless of the participants' self-reported racial attitudes, which means that they weren't even aware they were having these troubling responses.

If so, then it's not enough to study the way the media portray⁴ racial groups. It's also important to study how the public interprets and remembers--or misremembers--the news in a way that sustains racism⁸.  

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