Different prejudices toward different types of interracial couples: Examining alternative explanationsPosted in Live Events, Media Archive, Papers/Presentations, Social Science, United States on 2009-10-19 20:25Z by Steven |
SPSP 2010
The Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology
2010-01-28 through 2010-01-30
Las Vegas, Nevada
Stephen A. Mistler
Arizona State University
Angela G. Pirlott
Arizona State University
Steven L. Neuberg
Arizona State University
Between 1992 and 2000, the prevalence of interracial marriage in the United States more than doubled, increasing from 2.2% to 4.9%. How do people feel about such relationships, and what accounts for these feelings? Undergraduate students rated relationships of Asian, Black, and White men with Asian, Black, and White women; each participant answered the same questions for all nine possible heterosexual pairings of the above groups, as well as items designed to assess, for each race-gender type (e.g., Asian female), beliefs about their long-term mate value, short-term mate value, and scarcity as potential mates. Given issues of sample size, we report only findings from White participants. In general, White participants expressed more prejudice against interracial couples than same-race couples, even for couplings not involving members of their own race. This apparently simple bias, however, masks a more complex psychology based on interactions of specific race-gender pairings with perceiver gender. As one example, White participants were less accepting of White women with minority men than of White men with minority women, and reacted particularly negatively to the pairing of White women with Black men than to the pairing of White women with Asian men; these patterns of antipathy were especially strong for White male participants. We assess the broader range of findings in light of frameworks suggesting that negative reactions toward interracial couples arise from concerns with “race-mixing,” from concerns about potential lost resources for one’s group, and from assessments of valuable reproductive opportunities potentially gained and lost.