Thursday, April 28, 2011
Research Shows Racial Bias Influences Views of Obama
Racial prejudice among some white Americans—even if unintentional—influences their views of President Barack Obama’s “Americanism” and their assessment of how well he is performing in office, according to a University of Delaware doctoral student.
The psychology student, Eric Hehman, recently received the national Albert Bandura Graduate Research Award for his paper detailing a research study he conducted on the subject. The article, “Evaluations of Presidential Performance: Race, Prejudice, and Perceptions of Americanism,” was published in the March issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
Hehman, whose adviser and co-author is Samuel Gaertner, professor of psychology, specializes in intergroup relations. He often focuses on such topics as prejudice and discrimination.
The hypothesis for Hehman’s paper centered around the possibility that whites’ racial prejudices influenced “how American” they perceived Obama to be, which would in turn predict their evaluations of his presidential performance.
Furthermore, Hehman predicted that whites would be the only group in which such racial prejudice would ultimately influence their evaluations of performance and that it would affect only their evaluations of the president. He predicted that when whites evaluated Vice President Joseph R. Biden, Jr., or when African Americans evaluated either Obama or Biden, racial prejudices would not affect their assessments.
Hehman collected responses from about 300 white and black members of the UD community, asking them to evaluate the success in office of either Obama or Biden. “Our predictions were ultimately supported,” Hehman said. “Whites who were racially prejudiced against blacks saw Obama as ‘less American’ and subsequently rated him as performing more poorly as president.
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