Conditioned emotional responses in racial prejudice

Abstract

This study pursues a learning theory understanding of adverse race-elicited emotion and racially discriminatory behaviour. Multimodal classical conditioning argues that emotional reactions to neutral stimuli are built from aversive, appetitive and neutral experiences involving those stimuli in direct, observational and/or verbal modes. Modern two-factor theory argues that once adverse emotions are established, avoidance is likely to develop. Participants rated their frequency of aversive, appetitive and neutral experiences with racially different others; the degree of fear, anxiety and anger they typically feel in inter-racial situations; and the frequency with which they avoid/approach such situations. Results indicated that direct, observational and verbal aversive contacts were associated with more fear, anxiety and anger. Neutral contacts in all modes were associated with less fear and observational neutral contacts were associated with less anger. Direct avoidance was predicted by fear and anxiety. The value of using this approach to understand adverse race-elicited emotion is discussed.

Keywords:

• Racism
• prejudice
• classical conditioning
• emotions
• avoidance
• approach

Notes

1. In this paper, the term ‘racism’ refers, collectively, to the phenomena of racial prejudice and discrimination.

2. ‘Race’ has been shown to be an anthropologically meaningless social construct (see Smedley and Smedley 2005); however, because of its common language usage, it is used in this paper to capture differences marked by skin colour, hair texture, facial features and the like.

3. The adjectives conditional and unconditional for stimuli and responses replace conditioned and unconditioned used in earlier classical conditioning literature.

4. Although all ethnic and racial terms are imprecise, ‘black’, ‘white’, ‘Asian’, and ‘Hispanic’ will be used to refer to self-identified African, European, Asian and Hispanic ancestry ethnic groups, respectively.

5. Dygdon, Conger and Strahan (2004) studied the order of presentation of experience and emotion forms and found no effect for order.

6. Sex was included in all analyses but because it did not have any significant main effects or interactions it is not described in results presentations.

7. Bouton (1994) reviewed data that suggest that appetitive experiences with CSs produce latent inhibition and extinction effects (regarding adverse CRs) as well.