The Effects of Prejudice.

Our judgments about other people can hardly escape being influenced by our feelings (prejudices) about their group as a whole. Several studies show this dramatically (Sweeney and Haney, 1992; Ugwuegbu, 1979). In one study, White students were asked to serve as jurors in a mock rape trial. Each read a hypothetical, but very realistic, account of the rape of a nineteen-year-old White woman by a twenty-one-year-old man. Four different accounts (experimental conditions) were used. In one account, the alleged rapist was a Black man, and the evidence against him was strong (both the female victim and an eyewitness identified the rapist). In another, the alleged rapist was Black and the evidence against him was weak (neither the female victim nor the eyewitness could identify the rapist). In two other accounts, the evidence followed a similar pattern, but the rapist was a White man. The results were interesting. On a scale of blame, the Black man was always blamed more than the White man, regardless of whether the evidence was weak or strong. The strength of the evidence made a slight difference. Both alleged rapists were perceived as more culpable when the evidence was strong as opposed to weak. The point is that race has an effect on the amount of blame attributed to the alleged rapist÷in addition to the effect of the strength of the evidence. Race by itself has a clear and separate÷even bigger÷effect.

The results were similar no matter what the race of the juror, although a Black juror was somewhat less likely than a White juror to attribute blame to the Black alleged rapist. Strikingly similar results have been obtained, when possible, in actual rape trials in real courts by comparing trials with defendants of a different race and trials with differing evidence strength (Loewen, 1982; Sweeney and Haney, 1992).

Racial and ethnic prejudice also has a marked effect on people's political views and on how they vote. This is shown in studies that incorporate a separate measure of the amount of the individual's prejudice and relate this to voting preferences. For example, when Jesse Jackson, the Black minister and political activist, ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984, he was opposed most by Whites who were highly prejudiced, whereas less prejudiced Whites were more likely to favor him (Sears et al., 1988). The difference was attributable to prejudice itself, not the objective advantages and disadvantages of the candidate.