Social Psychology

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"As blatant prejudice wanes, subtle prejudice lingers," I say in the social psychology chapter. In the March, 1998 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Kent Harber demonstrates a subtle form of prejudice. For his doctoral research at Stanford under Claude Steele's mentorship, he asked white undergraduate students to grade a flawed essay said to be written by either an African American or a white fellow student. (The subjects were told that the researchers were exploring peer tutoring for writing skills workshop participants.)

The finding: Ratings and copyedited comments on the content were markedly higher when the writer was said to be African American. When the writer was thought to be white, evaluations were lower, sometimes evoking such harsh comments as "When I read college work this bad I just want to lay my head down on the table and cry." The identical essay never received such harsh criticism when its writer was said to be African American.

Harber offers several possible explanations for this leniency bias. Perhaps, he reasons, "evaluations of stereotyped groups are calibrated to group-based stereotypes." If well-meaning white students harbor negative stereotypes of African-American students' verbal skills, this could cause them "to employ less exacting standards."

"The positive feedback bias may present serious costs for minorities," Harber concludes. "Inflated praise and insufficient criticism may dissuade minority students from striving toward greater achievement levels and may misrepresent the level of effort and mastery that academic and professional advancement entail. . . Biased feedback may also deprive minority students of the mental challenge that educators (e.g., Sommers, 1982) have cited as critical for intellectual growth. Steele (1992, 1995) noted that African American college students, in particular, are subject to low expectations and insufficient challenge and that they suffer both academically and psychologically as a result."