People easily generate race-neutral justifications for decisions actually driven by race

Evidence

Participants were significantly more likely to challenge the Black juror than the White juror, regardless of which profile was specified as a Black man. Furthermore, when asked to explain their decision, participants easily generated race-neutral reasons for the peremptory challenges. In fact, although race was clearly the primary factor influencing their decisions, only 7 percent of participants mentioned race in their response. — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 885

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s core question about the divergence between actual measured bias and articulated/professed reasons — connects to the ‘sincere-conviction-vs-measured-bias gap’ theme across legal and social-psych sources. — connects to: Ideas matter only as they strengthen the race and subjugate others; Stage-by-stage siting analysis can reveal racism when discrete decisions look neutral.
• ADDENDUM: Relevant to the reader’s legal further-reading volume on racial prejudice in criminal justice — this documents how procedural legal safeguards (Batson) fail because actors conjure race-neutral narratives to mask bias.
• DEEPTHINKING: The 7-percent figure captures how effortlessly people produce post-hoc rationalizations that mask genuine causal drivers — a dense finding about the relationship between self-report and measured bias.
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law: A Definitive Look at…, 885