Modern Racism and Modern Discrimination: The Effects of Race, Racial Attitudes, and Context on Simulated Hiring Decisions
Abstract
Researchers in American race relations have demonstrated the ambivalence white Americans feel toward black Americans. The prejudiced white behaves positively or negatively toward blacks depending on the context of the behavior, while the less prejudiced white behaves more consistently across contexts. In this study, the ambivalence concept was used to demonstrate the construct validity of a relatively nonreactive scale of racial prejudice-the Modern Racism Scale. Eighty-one white college students were pretested on the scale and then evaluated job candidates with identical resumes (except for a picture of a black or white male) under contexts designed to elicit positive or negative discrimination by ambivalent (presumably prejudiced) subjects. As predicted, when the candidate was black, the Modern Racism Scale was negatively correlated with hiring evaluations in the negative context and positively correlated in the positive context. When the job candidate was white, context and the Modern Racism Scale were unrelated to hiring evaluations.
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1.
1 The exact wording of the Modern Racism Scale items and the scale's psychometric properties in college and general populations were published in McConahay (1982), McConahay, Hardee, and Batts (1981), and McConahay and Hough (1976). Hence these scale details will not be presented here.
2.
2 Preliminary analyses showed that (1) gender of subject was unrelated to the Modern Racism Scale and had no significant main or interaction effects on the dependent variable, (2) the individual pictures on the resumes had no effects within race of job candidate, and (3) the ratings of the job candidates without pictures were unaffected by the independent variables and were not significantly different from Thompson when he had a white picture regardless of the order of rating. Therefore, these factors were not considered in all further analyses.
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Article first published: December 1983
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