Black Americans' Implicit Racial Associations And Their Implications for Intergroup Judgment

Many—though not all—black Americans exhibit an implicit evaluative preference for whites relative to blacks (e.g., Livingston, 2002). Are such biases meaningfully related to blacks' explicit attitudes and actual intergroup judgments? In the present study, 83 black participants who believed they would complete an intellectually challenging task with a partner rated their preferences for (fictitious) black and white potential partners. The less strongly participants implicitly preferred their ingroup, the lower their preference for a black vs. a white work partner. The magnitude of this relationship held even when controlling for explicit attitudes that were related to partner preference. Implicit biases were associated with explicit attitudes regarding black, but not white, persons and with system-justifying ideology (Jost & Banaji, 1994).