‘White men can’t jump in a black basketball game?’ An exploratory investigation of implicit strategies of outgroup discrimination

Abstract

Examining the ‘natural’ athlete myth and utilizing the recent literature on cultural/social factors in athleticism and basketball, this study through survey research examines the influence of stereotypes on the impression formation of basketball players. The primary research question is to determine from a group of students the attitudes of basketball players in terms of how they evaluate white and black players in basketball. The purpose is to identify participants’ perceptions and their appreciation as to whether or not black are superior to white basketball players. The theoretical framework employed is articulated around the theory of social categorization and racial stereotypes already observed in sports. In an initial qualitative phase, the results show that stereotypical representations exert an influence on the skills associated with basketball players depending on the colour of their skin, which is reflected in the use of adjectives specific to each of the categories of black and white. In a second quantitative phase, whereas a more favourable view of black basketball players might have been attributable to positive discrimination as per the anti-racist norm, the results show the activation of a bias towards favouring one’s own group. Once all of the initial adjectives have been expressed, the targets behave in the expected way in terms of the laws of social categorization i.e. they have a more positive view of the members of their own group (the Whites) than of the other group (the Blacks) as adjectives are cited for describing skills.

Notes

1. When he was attending a meeting on 8 November 2011 at the Federation Headquarters as the trainer of the French national football team, Laurent Blanc spoke of a link between players’ skin colour and their assumed qualities: ‘Big, strong and powerful. Who do we have now who are big, strong and powerful? The Blacks’.

2. When he was attending a meeting on 8 November 2011 at the Federation Headquarters as the trainer of the French national football team, Laurent Blanc spoke of a link between players’ skin colour and their assumed qualities: ‘Big, strong and powerful. Who do we have now who are big, strong and powerful? The Blacks’.

3. However, the history of professional basketball has made the danger of predicting athletic success based solely on race clear: many White players have not just played, but excelled in the NBA (e.g. Larry Bird, John Stockton, Toni Kukoc, Manu Ginobili, Pau Gasol, Dirk Nowitzki, just to name a few). Today, at the heart of a veritable ethnic melting pot of great significance and undergoing constant change, basketball readily welcomes players from a wide range of national and ethnic backgrounds into its European and US professional leagues. For the current 2014–15 season, the NBA league numbers 101 players from 37 different countries.

4. For academics performances, see also Beilock et al. 2006, 2004; Steele and Aronson 1995).

5. The formation of the categories follows the principle of meta-contrast (Turner et al. 1987): where a comparison is being made, a collection of stimuli will have more chance of being categorized as an entity if, depending on the relative parameters for comparison, the differences between these stimuli (intra-category differences) are perceived to be smaller than the differences between this collection of stimuli and other stimuli (inter-category differences).

6. Here, although based on the findings of three major currents of thought on social representation (Moscovici 1961; Abric 1994; Doise 1973), the representation is mainly used as a way to access inter-group relations, and particularly social divisions (Castel and Lacassagne 2011).

7. Along the lines of the first studies carried out by Loy and Elvogue (1970) and for a methodology based on photography, see recently Kaiser, Williams, and Norwood 2016; Perchot et al. 2015.

8. In this study, we focus on the role of categorical identities White/Black to explore race relation in sport with the choice to always ask to describe white players first. In doing so, it is about activating the processes that underpin intergroup relations are activated (Tajfel 1978; 1979, 1981, 1982) to figure out in a rather accurate manner what may hamper or facilitate the transition from the first (White) to the second group (Black).

9. This effect was found identical in a study of the relationships between the sub-Saharan African Immigrants and the French (Velandia-Coustol, Castel, and Lacassagne 2015), a study using the same RepMut tool.