NewsWatch: 2009: Bigotry

[Narrator:] From the University of California at Davis, this is NewsWatch.

[Paul Pfotenhauer:] Is racial prejudice less common today or just less acceptable? As it turns out, people do not get any more racially prejudiced as they age, but they do become less able to hide it. In a study that assessed biases among whites toward blacks, it was easier for younger people to pair pictures of black faces with positive words than for older people.

[Jeffrey Sherman, UC Davis Social Pscyhologist:] Why is it that as people age they show more of this bias? And so, in particular we wanted to compare two different hypotheses. One, is that as people get older they have more negative associations – this idea that older people grew up in a different cultural environment and maybe from the time they were young they just developed more negative associations with black people than younger people have.

[Paul Pfotenhauer:] The other hypotheses were that as people ages they lose some of their ability to regulate their automatic responses or impulses.

[Jeffrey Sherman:] We found that the self-regulation explanation was the one that was supported by our analyses.

[Paul Pfotenhauer:] The researchers concluded that negative associations are present across the age spectrum, but older people are less able to overcome them when pairing faces with words.

[Paul Pfotenhauer:] When African Americans took the test, the results were surprising.

[Jeffrey Sherman:] The fact that a third of African Americans show a pro white bias on the measure is one of the data points that suggests that it is something cultural."

[Paul Pfotenhauer:] Sherman says biased behavior may become an increasingly common social problem as the population ages. Paul Pfotenhauer, reporting from UC Davis.

[Narrator:] For more information please log on to broadcast.ucdavis.edu.