An Investigation into the Effects of Race on the Perception of Guilt

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An Investigation into the Effects of Race on the Perception of Guilt

Abstract

The aim is the see whether people are more likely to find a black man

guilty of a crime. Having found both a black man and a white man of

middle attractiveness out of a choice of 10 photos picked from

magazines, subjects were read a short account of a crime and rated the

guilt of the offender on a scale of 0 to 10 (with 0 being not guilty).

I used subjects aged between 11 and 18, all were Caucasian and

attended Sevenoaks School. I used 75 subjects in total. They were

shown either the picture of the black man, the picture of the white

man or no picture as a control. The results showed that the black man

was perceived to be more guilty than the white man. The average guilt

rating of the white man was 5.2 and for the black man was 6.98. Using

the Mann-Whitney U test, this data was shown to be significant at the

5% level. This illustrates that certain racial stereotypes still exist

in society but perhaps on a subconscious level.

Introduction

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Theory

In 1954 Bruner and Tagiuri theorised that our perceptions of others

are not based on reality but on our general expectations. Everyone has

ideas about which personality traits are consistent with other

personality or physical traits. This theory is Implicit Personality

Theory (IPT), this is an "unconscious inference process that enables

us to form impressions of people based on very little evidence." IPTs

are shared by everyone in a culture and govern their behaviour at an

unconscious level. IPT can be demonstrated using experimental

techniques and manifests itself in many ways, ...

... middle of paper ...

...ysical traits are associated with personality

traits. There seems to be evidence to suggest that racial stereotypes

exist, associating blacks which committing crimes as Katz and Braly

discovered back in 1933. Some 70 years on, despite all human rights

progress, racism exists. My study reinforces the investigation by the

Howard League, which states that the British League system is biased

against blacks. This creates issues when considering the validity of

trial by jury. A majority white jury is more likely to convict a black

man of a crime than they would a white man if they were tried for the

same crime. These are rather sweeping statements to make on limited

information. To draw such strong conclusions is impossible but my

investigation, when added to others, casts enough of a shadow to

warrant further investigation.

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