Devine The Factors That Influence Racial Prejudice

This essay will argue that an individual’s prejudice is not something that is simply set in stone but is something that can be influenced and changed over time, through people’s ability to adapt to new information they receive. This essay will discuss the factors that influence racial bias and how that has an effect on groups in society’s life though scientific theories. Through the use of experiments, they will provide evidence that intervention programs work in reducing an individual’s prejudice towards race, that it isn’t formed, unwilling to change but something that can be influenced by information received in these programs. The work done specifically by Aboud and Doyle (1996), Lebrecht, Pierce, Tarr and Tanaka (2009) and Devine, Forscher,

Devine et al. (2012) designed a long term intervention program to help break racial bias and the help bring awareness of people’s biases and the people’s need to eliminate them from their daily lives. The experiment had a control group and intervention group and consisted of 91 non-Black psychology students. Each person’s prejudice level was measured using the Black-White IAT and also several explicit measures. The IAT is a dual categorisation task with participants given stimuli based on whether it was ‘pleasant or unpleasant’ or Black or White faces by pressing key. Explicit measurements included the use of Attitudes Towards Blacks (ATB) with twenty items using a scale of strongly agree to disagree. The experiment was a twelve-week long program in which all participants received an initial measure of the implicit bias and feedback on their level of bias. The intervention group over the 12 weeks was involved in number of training programs which the aim was to provide an awareness and concern for their racial bias and then provide strategies for those individuals to limit their racial bias. They received a number of strategies to reduce their racial prejudice and how to engage themselves in self-regulating their bias and were asked to report back on which strategy was best for them in reducing their prejudice.

An intervention study done to illustrate that individual’s prejudices towards race aren’t concrete is by Lebrecht et al. (2009). They conducted a study in which they wanted to prove that socio-cognitive attitudes towards implicit racial bias could be changed through training programs. They had two groups of White subjects who over the course of 5 sessions looked at the same African America faces in a training program. They used the Affective Lexial Priming Score to get a baseline implicit racial bias score, this tests provides individuals with a face followed by a word and they must decide if the word is valid English word or nonsense, the words can have a negative, positive or neutral connotation. One group was the individuation condition where subjects were taught how to distinguish between the faces they saw. The other was the categorisation group, where they learnt to differentiate if the faces they saw were African America or not. In the individualisation group participating in perceptual expertise training with African America faces and the categorisation group were trained to categorise faces as African America or Asian only. Their results found that the perceptual training undertaken in the individualisation group significantly reduce implicit racial bias taking longer to associate negative words or not associating negative words with other