Sex and Ethnic Bias in the Evaluation of Student Editorials

Summary

The Goldberg paradigm was used to assess racism and sexism among a sample of noncollege Caucasian adults. Radical and neutral student editorials, attributed to authors varying in sex and ethnicity (Caucasian and Mexican-American), were rated by 93 male and 91 female Ss for quality and level of agreement. The results indicated that the Ss were significantly less likely to agree with conclusions reached by the Mexican-American authors and rated the editorials written by females and Mexican-American authors as lower in quality. Secondly, the “radical” issue that was particularly relevant to Mexican-American interests (lower college admission standards) led to lower ratings of the Mexican-American authors than did the neutral article. While these results were not conclusive, they did suggest that the perceived “personal gain” of the author does influence the Ss' ratings of the editorials.