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Democracy Dies in Darkness

Morning Mix


 White liberals dumb themselves

 down when they speak to black

people, a new study contends


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Opinion
You have recently joined a book club. 
The electoral college is a
failure. The Founding
Before each meeting, one member of the literary collective sends an Fathers would probably
agree.
email to the club secretary offering a few thoughts on the assigned
Opinion
text. This month, it’s your turn to compose the brief review. 
Who are all these guys?

A new study suggests that the words you use may depend on
whether the club secretary’s name is Emily (“a stereotypically
White name,” as the study says) or Lakisha (“a stereotypically Black
name”). If you’re a white liberal writing to Emily, you might use
words like “melancholy” or “euphoric” to describe the mood of the
book, whereas you might trade these terms out for the simpler
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“sad” or “happy” if you’re corresponding with Lakisha.
He fought for justice. Now he’s
But if you’re a white conservative, your diction won’t depend on the facing misconduct allegations.
 Listen 28:47
presumed race of your interlocutor.
Unparalleled reporting. Expert insight.
Clear analysis. Everything you’ve come
This racial and political disparity is among the discoveries made by
to expect from the newsroom of The
a pair of social psychologists in a paper forthcoming in the Journal Post -- for your ears.
of Personality and Social Psychology, a peer-reviewed scientific
journal published by the American Psychological Association.
Cydney Dupree, an assistant professor of organizational behavior at
the Yale School of Management, and Susan Fiske, a professor of
psychology and public affairs at Princeton, documented what they
call a “competence downshift” exhibited by white liberals in
interactions with racial minorities, and with black people in
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The findings, based on what the authors stress is “preliminary
evidence,” raise difficult questions about aspirations for a so-called Try 1 month for $10 $1

post-racial society. The results reveal how subtle forms of

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discrimination may coincide with progress toward equal treatment,
or what the paper identifies as “a significant reduction in the Already a subscriber? Sign in

expression of explicit prejudice and endorsement of negative

stereotypes.”

The psychologists further discovered that white liberals rarely

admit to the goal of appearing less competent, a fact that highlights Must Reads newsletter
Get five of our best stories in your inbox every
the role of implicit bias and “the covert nature of the competence
Saturday, plus a peek behind the scenes into
downshift strategy.” how one came together.

“White liberals may unwittingly draw on negative stereotypes, E-mail address Add
dumbing themselves down in a likely well-meaning, ‘folksy,’ but
ultimately patronizing, attempt to connect with the outgroup,”
argues the paper, titled “Self-Presentation in Interracial Settings:
The Competence Downshift by White Liberals.”
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The findings could provide a new arrow in the quiver of those who
decry identity politics practiced by liberals, and yet the paper
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hardly applauds conservatives for their approach, reasoning that Policies and Standards

they are simply “less motivated to affiliate with racial minorities.” Terms of Service
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In other words, the paper states, white conservatives “would not
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“It’s somewhat counterintuitive,” said Dupree, who is the lead
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author and whose research was supported by the National Science Ad Choices
Foundation as well as by Princeton’s Joint Degree Program in
Social Policy. “The idea that people who are most well intentioned
toward racial minorities, the people actually showing up and
wanting to forge these connections, they’re the ones who seem to be
drawing on stereotypes to do so.”

At the same time, she said, the findings are in line with what
research has already concluded about the persistence of stereotypes
even as more overt bias diminishes. What’s new is the paper’s focus
on a population that has received less attention: people most likely
to see themselves as allies of racial minorities.

White liberals, she said, may not endorse stereotypes painting black
people “as lower status and less competent,” as the paper notes. But
they’re nevertheless aware of these ideas, she explained, “and they
may be using them to try to get along in a setting that we know is
tricky — navigating an interaction with someone who’s different
from you.”

The motive may be ingratiation, the paper suggests, since studies

show that white liberals are “concerned about appearing racist,” as
Dupree said. In their role as “impression managers,” white liberals
may even take on the negative stereotypes they harbor toward
people of other races, in an effort, as the paper puts it, to “get on
their level.”

Their conservative counterparts, meanwhile, appear not to employ

these stereotypes in the same way, as Dupree said, because, “we
know empirically that white conservatives are less likely to be
interested in getting along with racial minorities.” This became
starkly evident to the behavioral psychologist when she turned to
political campaign speeches for the first of several studies
conducted to test whether political ideology shaped how white
people presented themselves, on scales of competence and warmth,
depending on the race of their audience.

In tracking the word choices made by white Republican and

Democratic presidential candidates before white and black voters,
her sample size was limited primarily by “the number of speeches
in which Republican presidential candidates showed up for black
audiences,” she said. The race of the audience was approximated by
setting, at a black church for example, and by occasion, say the
40th anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s death.

What she found, by performing online text analysis of 74 campaign

speeches over the past 25 years, was that white candidates who
were Democrats used significantly fewer words about “agency or
power” and more about “affiliation and communality” when
addressing minority voters. There was no significant difference
exhibited by Republican candidates.

The irony, as the paper notes, is that “Whites who may be more
affiliative toward Blacks alter their verbal responses toward them in
a way that matches negative stereotypes. Despite the patronizing
behavior that they enact, these liberal candidates may hold more
goodwill toward minorities.”

Additional experiments fleshed out the effect. In these studies,

participants were either undergraduate students recruited through
Princeton’s Survey Research Center or users identified through
Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service, or MTurk, a relatively low-cost
source of subjects for experiments and other tasks. Political
ideology was mostly measured by authoritarian values and belief in
hierarchy, which researchers commonly use to assess political
conservatism.

In the hypothetical situation of the book club, participants viewed a

list of 24 pretested words and were asked to choose 12 to use in
their email to the group’s secretary. Liberal participants included
words “that would make them appear significantly less competent
with a Black interaction partner than with a White one,” the study
found, while conservative participants presented themselves as
equally competent with a black and white partner. A related
scenario, in which participants chose personality traits for
themselves in an introductory email, provided the weakest evidence
of a competence downgrade, which the authors reasoned could
have been a product of a “less competence-focused task.”

Finally, in an interaction that participants presumed to be real, they

viewed the first name of an online partner, and an avatar that the
partner had apparently chosen to present, and then filled out a
profile for themselves based on a set of available traits, such as
honest, capable, ambitious and helpful. Once their profile was
complete, they indicated how they hoped they would appear by
ranking several descriptions, including kind, intelligent, fair and
friendly.

Unlike in previous experiments, liberal whites indicated that their

goal was to appear less competent with a black partner than with a
white one. Conservatives betrayed no such goal. The final
experiment also stood apart because it was presumed by
participants to be real, whereas the others were clearly
hypothetical. It also presented them with visual evidence of their
partner’s race, while the others relied only on names.

Across the studies, the paper concludes, “liberals’ competence

downshift is a subtle, but consistent effect.” At the same time, it
acknowledges the difficulties of tracking subtle shifts in self-
presentation, and calls for additional research that goes beyond
online interactions. It says that future studies should strive for
larger sample sizes.

Further examination is also required, Dupree said, to determine

whether people make themselves appear less competent with any
group whose approval they’re trying to earn. It might be
worthwhile, for instance, to look at Asian Americans, she said,
because they are less likely to be stereotyped as incompetent.

The studies controlled for the gender of speakers but not of their
audience, Dupree said, meaning that there could be an additional
difference, for example, if someone were speaking to a black man or
a black woman.

The data doesn’t point to conclusions about whether the

competence downshift is effective in smoothing fraught
interactions. As the paper observes, the behavioral difference is
subtle, and Dupree said it’s “possible that racial minorities don’t
necessarily pick up on the shift.”

At the same time, she said, research shows that racial minorities are
more concerned about being respected than about being liked.
“They may be attuned to the possibility of being patronized,” she
speculated.

Dupree said she was driven to conduct the research by a gap that
she had identified while in graduate school in work on prejudice,
which barely addressed people less likely to be biased against
minorities. So, too, was she driven to explore topics that were
“personally meaningful” to her.

“I will say that this was a topic I was and still am very much
invested in,” she said. “While the result may seem counterintuitive
to some, it may not be to others. I fully understand both reactions.”

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Isaac Stanley-Becker
Isaac Stanley-Becker is a reporter on The Washington Post's Morning Mix
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