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blue bits. red rocks.
Friday 17 October 2008

So what’s happening when voters say they are “uneasy” with Obama and then offer one seemingly thin rationalization or another for what they are feeling (e.g., maybe it’s really true that he’s a Muslim, maybe he doesn’t really love his country, maybe he’ll put black people first)? We greatly oversimplify the race issue when we describe people as either racist or not racist. Years of research in psychology and neuroscience suggest that you can only understand the concept of prejudice if you add the qualifier “conscious” or “unconscious.” Most Americans are not consciously racist. In Georgia, we polled voters months ago as to whether they would be more likely to vote for a candidate who explicitly said that in this country we don’t discriminate against people on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation. Even including sexual orientation in that statement in a conservative Southern state, fully 85 percent of voters indicated that they would be more likely to vote for that candidate—including the majority of Republicans. They weren’t lying. Nor are the millions of Americans who deny negative feelings toward black people (and may even consider themselves liberal or progressive) but for whom brain scans suggest fear responses when they are presented with subliminal imaged of black men (i.e., images presented too rapidly to be seen consciously but slowly enough—in hundredths of a second—for their brains to process). Although some of the “Bradley effect” reflects what psychologists call “social desirability effects”—the desire, in this case, not to seem prejudiced (particularly if people intuit that the pollster on the other end of the line is black)—the fact that prejudice is socially undesirable and something people would want to hide speaks volumes about how far our conscious values have changed over the last 40 years. What’s far more dangerous to Obama in the polling booth—unlike the caucus, where discussion and eye-to-eye contact activate people’s conscious values—are unconscious associations to race of which people are largely unaware. Drew Westen

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