Rabinowitz Joshua L, Sears David O, Sidanius Jim, Krosnick Jon A
University of Michigan.
Polit Psychol. 2009 Oct 1;30(5):805-828. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9221.2009.00726.x.
Measures of symbolic racism (SR) have often been used to tap racial prejudice toward Blacks. However, given the wording of questions used for this purpose, some of the apparent effects on attitudes toward policies to help Blacks may instead be due to political conservatism, attitudes toward government, and/or attitudes toward redistributive government policies in general. Using data from national probability sample surveys and an experiment, we explored whether SR has effects even when controlling for these potential confounds and whether its effects are specific to policies involving Blacks. Holding constant conservatism and attitudes toward limited government, SR predicted Whites' opposition to policies designed to help Blacks and more weakly predicted attitudes toward social programs whose beneficiaries were racially ambiguous. An experimental manipulation of policy beneficiaries revealed that SR predicted policy attitudes when Blacks were the beneficiary but not when women were. These findings are consistent with the claim that SR's association with racial policy preferences is not due to these confounds.
象征主义种族主义（SR）的衡量标准常常被用于探究对黑人的种族偏见。然而，鉴于用于此目的的问题措辞，一些对帮助黑人政策的态度上的明显影响，可能反而归因于政治保守主义、对政府的态度以及/或者对一般再分配性政府政策的态度。利用来自全国概率抽样调查的数据和一项实验，我们探究了即使在控制这些潜在混淆因素的情况下，SR是否仍有影响，以及其影响是否特定于涉及黑人的政策。在保守主义和对有限政府的态度保持不变的情况下，SR预测了白人对旨在帮助黑人的政策的反对，并且对受益人群在种族上不明确的社会项目的态度预测力较弱。一项对政策受益者的实验性操作表明，当黑人是受益者时，SR预测了政策态度，但当女性是受益者时则不然。这些发现与SR与种族政策偏好之间的关联并非由于这些混淆因素这一说法相一致。
