Study finds bias, disgust toward mixed-race couples

[Guest Gee]

Interracial marriage has grown in the United States over the past few decades, and polls show that most Americans are accepting of mixed-race relationships.

 

A 2012 study by the Pew Research Center found that interracial marriages in the U.S. had doubled between 1980 and 2010 to about 15 percent, and just 11 percent of respondents disapproved of interracial marriage.

 

But new research from the University of Washington suggests that reported acceptance of interracial marriage masks deeper feelings of discomfort—even disgust—that some feel about mixed-race couples. Published online in July in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology and co-authored by UW postdoctoral researcher Caitlin Hudac, the study found that bias against interracial couples is associated with disgust that in turn leads interracial couples to be dehumanized.A 2012 study by the Pew Research Center found that interracial marriages in the U.S. had doubled between 1980 and 2010 to about 15 percent, and just 11 percent of respondents disapproved of interracial marriage.

 

Lead author Allison Skinner, a UW postdoctoral researcher, said she undertook the study after noting a lack of in-depth research on bias toward interracial couples.

 

"I felt like the polls weren't telling the whole story," said Skinner, a researcher in the UW's Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences.

The research involved three experiments. In the first, 152 college students were asked a series of questions about relationships, including how disgusted they felt about various configurations of interracial relationships and about their own willingness to have an interracial romance. The participants overall showed high levels of acceptance and low levels of disgust about interracial relationships, and pointed to a strong negative correlation between the two.

 

In the second experiment, the researchers showed 19 undergraduate students wedding and engagement photos of 200 interracial and same-race couples while recording their neural activity. The researchers asked the students to quickly indicate whether each couple should be included in a future study on relationships, a task that was intended to ensure participants were socially evaluating the couples while their neural activity was recorded.

 

Participants responded faster to images of same-race couples and selected them more often for inclusion in the study. More significantly, Skinner said, participants showed higher levels of activation in the insula—an area of the brain routinely implicated in the perception and experience of disgust—while viewing images of interracial couples.

 

"That indicates that viewing images of interracial couples evokes disgust at a neural level," Skinner said.

 

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-08-bias-disgust-mixed-race-couples.html#jCp

 

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Interesting stuff, you racists!

 

Check out the final sentence of the article. Ominous.

[Donnadogsoth]

Interesting article, Graham.  Thanks for posting it.

 

I view race in terms of the Solar system.  The different races are like the planets, each in its own orbit, each with its own constitutional makeup.  Interracial people are like the exploded planet that Kepler successfully predicted should occupy the gap between Mars and Jupiter.

 

The only solution to the niggling fact that "ome people are still not comfortable with interracial relationships, or at least they're a lot less comfortable than they would appear to be," is to destroy the races by combining them, exploding them, and making them all the Asteroid Belt.  Since destroying the Coloured races is not an option, the social doctors will have to settle for destroying the White race in particular, and they are well along with that goal.  Unfortunately for them a large nationalist Black Swan appears to have manifested and made its nest at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue...

[Kestrelraptorial]

Okay. After reading through the article a couple of times, here is what I think: This study has a strangely large number of factors to it, and it is really three different studies. The first, as the article describes, is simply a survey (it doesn't say whether it was oral or written) of questions of how college students felt about various racial and interracial matchups. It reports a high proportion of tolerance . . . unsurprising, as most people believe that they are. The second involves a different, much smaller sample of college students being shown wedding photographs - and here, I'd say the exact same group should have been tested to examine belief in tolerance versus visual response among the same population sample. Now, the authors believe that the insula activation in their brains infers a lower level of tolerance than initially believed, but the problem is that, admittedly, the insula can respond to emotions other than disgust (and 'disgust' is a strange choice of emotion to be looking for anyway, why not just 'discomfort'?), and again, the first and second surveys are not directly comparable because a different sample of people (19 college students in visual response versus 152 in oral/written were tested). 

 

Now, for the third test, before it even begins, the two samples of people, taken from 200 participants, had already gone through pre-test response conditioning: disgusting images versus pleasant images. Then, people of each group were asked to categorize couples of various race mixtures as either: (mixed-race or animal-like) or (human or same-race). This is going to immediately mean that same-race couples will be easily more selected to be 'human' and not 'animal-like' because the participants, I'm guessing, are going to more often push the same-race button when they see a same-race couple and vice-versa. Then the buttons were switched, meaning that same-race couples were more easily associated with animals. The test showed that participants were quicker to push the same-race button when it was attached with the 'human' button than with the 'animal' button. While I cannot disprove that this reveals a bias against mixed-race couples, I have no idea how the disgusting images versus pleasant images shown at the beginning may have affected the participants because its that distribution of the images among the people and those who responded quicker versus slower is never explored. In my opinion, these pre-test images were unnecessary to the experiment, only the responses and response times to the couples images should have been explored, because that's all that was in question. Also, why add in the human versus animal associations? Again, why not simply look for responses of 'comfort' or 'discomfort' again? Physical responses in addition to the already examined oral(or written, still not sure which from Test 1) and mental? 

 

So, yeah, the study looks conclusive at first glance, but upon closer examination, has a few too many factors and possible factors to really be. Also, is it unconscious bias that this study was supposed to reveal, because that is difficult to directly associate with actively expressed behavior towards people. It is also known that it is, while certainly possible, still difficult to maintain a stable relationship with someone from a different culture and background, and different races do have, of varying degrees, different cultures and subcultures. So I don't know how or if that was taken into account. 

[D-Light]

It would be very informative to gather further information about early childhood exposure to members of other races and how members of such races were perceived by the child's family members, peers, and other authority figures which tend to help the child identify their ingroup.

[rosencrantz]

One of the most reproduced tests in psychology deals with picking dolls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_and_Mamie_ClarkAs it turns out, dolls with lighter skin tone are preferred over those with darker tones. Furthermore, you have the same results in multicultural societies with adults, where generally partners whiter partners are preferred over darker ones.