Exclusion and prejudice: Is the threat of future social exclusion associated with an increase in implicit racial bias?

Abstract

While explicit racial bias has appeared to decrease in the U.S. in the past decades, implicit racial bias continues to be a pervasive issue in American society. Empirical studies have suggested that changes in one’s environment can temporarily affect implicit racial bias levels. The current research aimed to study the effects of threatened future social exclusion on implicit racial bias, measured by the Implicit Association Test (IAT) for race. The assumption was that participants threatened with future social exclusion would score, on average, higher on the IAT for race, suggesting a temporary increase in implicit racial bias post threat exposure. The participants (n=69) were White, U.S. Americans between 18 and 60 of age whose first language was English. Following past research, the threat of social exclusion was manipulated by giving bogus feedback on a personality test - The Revised Eysenck Personality Questionnaire – which preceded the IAT test. A one-way ANOVA analysis and a Tukey HSD multiple comparisons table supported the hypothesis (p .030). Still, they left unanswered the question of whether the threat of social exclusion specifically caused the implicit bias increase or whether the general negative effect induced by receiving an unfavorable prediction for one’s future was the trigger. An analysis of the covariates revealed that age, unlike gender, was a significant covariate.