An African-American President? One with a strange name even? Luckily, Barack Obama has everything else, it would seem, in his favor going into the general election, because those infamous "closet Muslim" e-mails will keep coming and they will continue to affect a surprising number of voters.
Should even a more or less explicable skeleton be found in Obama’s closet the number of disaffected voters could grow at a rate that would challenge our image of the American people, even of Progressives. Why? Because of the well documented affect of Implicit Associations within the human subconscious.
The Situationist blog has posted an abstract from a paper by Gregory Scott Parks and Jeffrey J. Rachlinski entitled "Unconscious Bias in the 2008 Presidential Election". The abstract begins in reassuring fashion that belies its thesis:
The 2008 presidential campaign and election will be historic. It marks the first time a Black person (Barack Obama) and a woman (Hillary Clinton) have a real chance at winning the Presidency. Their viability as candidates symbolizes significant progress in overcoming racial and gender stereotypes in America.
From there it segues into a discussion about the undertow that Obama faces as an African-American job applicant.
The thesis is not a new one. The preponderance of scientific data, however, suggests that even African-American presidential candidates are fully subject to its effects. Given the intense, continual scrutiny that a presidential candidate labors under, and the tradition of Republican dirty tricks, there is considerable reason for concern.
The numbers are daunting:
A large percentage of whites harbor anti-black/pro-white biases — some 70-90%. That means that they demonstrate an implicit preference for white over black, manifest as faster responding for the white/pleasant combination than for the black/pleasant combination. These results are quite robust as seen in individual experiments with dozens of subjects as well as in web-based studies of hundreds of thousands of individuals.
While even those with racially-biased implicit associations can choose to vote for a black candidate, those biases will be electorally meaningful within a population of millions (i.e. the electorate). Moreover, in a close election those numbers are more likely to actually decide the contest.
One study, in particular, seems to have touched upon more or less the full range of issues that face Barack Obama:
One important study that should be mentioned demonstrated how "racialized" names trigger racial schemas. Researchers responded to more than 1300 help-wanted ads in Boston and Chicago with fictitious resumes. The resumes were crafted to be comparably qualified with the only difference being that half of the resumes were randomly assigned stereotypically black names (e.g., Lakisha Washington). The other half were assigned "white" names (e.g., Emily Walsh). The white resumes received 50% more callbacks. Jerry Kang (UCLA law professor [and Situationist contributor]) rearticulated these results in terms of racial schemas such that employers use the names of applicants to categorize applicants into racial categories. Once the names are racially mapped, some set of negative racial meanings are automatically activated. In turn, these stereotypes and prejudices result in fewer callbacks for blacks.
Job applicants are regularly rejected by relatively sophisticated groups of people, in the privacy of their offices, based upon race and "strange" name. Every member of those groups is likely to profess racial equality when in public. Most will even believe their own false representations.
Voters have their own private office in which to make their hiring decisions, as well....
An Implicit Associations Test targetted toward presidential candidates appears at the Edge site.