Reported racial attitudes often diverge from actual discriminatory behavior

Evidence

The impetus to revisit Allport’s discussion of “inner conflict” was an effort to address a perplexing set of research findings concerning expressions of prejudice in the wake of the legislative and normative changes that made overt expressions of prejudice both illegal and socially taboo. Social scientists were struggling to explain the disparity between people’s reports of their racial attitudes (i.e., what they say) and their behavior (i.e., what they do; see Crosby, Bromley, & Saxe, 1980). That is, although White Americans often reported relatively positive attitudes toward Black Americans on surveys, their behaviors often belied these statements and revealed substantial evidence of prejudice – perhaps direct evidence of the “split between reason and prejudice.” — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice, 2089

Categorization

• XREF: The attitude-behavior gap here is the puzzle that seeded aversive racism theory and modern implicit bias research. — connects to: Social desirability bias makes present-day racial preference measurement difficult — Ilyana Kuziemko and Ebonya Washington, Why Did the Democrats Lose the South?…, 986; Ambiguous police stops confirm minorities’ belief that officers are racist; Mortality salience shifts Whites’ racial-pride and discrimination judgments in favor of their own race. — Jeff Greenberg and Spee Kosloff, Terror Management Theory: Implications…, 44
• SEED: An essay angle: the survey-vs-behavior gap as a methodological caution — self-report measures systematically miss bias that only shows up in behavior.