Thanks to H-ITAM, Ben Lawton Editor.

Findings suggest unconscious biases, possibly instilled by the media, can shape behavior even when people do not consciously endorse such biases.
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WITH VIDEO GAMES, RESEARCHERS LINK GUNS TO STEREOTYPES.

New York Times
By Erica Goode
December 10, 2002

...Dr. Bernadette Park, a professor of psychology at the University of Colorado at Boulder and an author of a report on the studies to be published today in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

...The findings mesh with other research indicating that unconscious biases, possibly instilled by the news media, advertising or other cultural influences, can shape behavior, even when people do not consciously endorse such biases....

"We wanted to ask a very basic question," Dr. Park said. "Does the normal public show a differential association of violence with blacks as opposed to whites?

[RAA NOTE: The results of this report seems so obvious. But then substituting "blacks" with "Italians", would probably not result in much of a different answer.

Research inspired by controversial events has a long history in social psychology. For example, the murder in 1964 of Kitty Genovese, (An Italian American) stabbed to death in Queens while 38 witnesses disregarded her cries, gave rise to many studies of behavior by bystanders.... 

Dr. Anthony G. Greenwald, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington, and two colleagues will publish findings next year in The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology that confirm and extend the findings of Dr. Park and her colleagues....

Numerous studies over the last 30 years have found that in ambiguous situations, blacks are more likely to be perceived as violent than whites performing the same actions. In one study, the subjects saw two men engaged in a discussion in the course of which one man lightly pushed the other's shoulder. When a black man pushed a white man, the action was described by the subjects as violent. When the situation was reversed, the push was perceived as "playing."

Dr. Greenwald and Dr. Park said their findings did not necessarily reflect conscious prejudice.

"We live in a sea of associations," Dr. Greenwald said. "Lots of people have the automatic race stereotypes, but far fewer people are what we would call prejudiced, if we understand prejudice as intentional discrimination against some group.

"In recent years, Dr. Greenwald and Dr. Mahzarin R. Banaji, a professor of psychology formerly at Yale and now at Harvard, have studied hidden biases about race, age and sex using an "implicit association test" that appears to tap such unconscious stereotypes and attitudes.

In the tests, they have found that most people are quicker to press computer keys in response to words and pictures that go together in a cultural stereotype than they are in response to words and pictures that go against a cultural stereotype.

People taking the test on race, Dr. Greenwald and Dr. Banaji said, are often upset at having displayed biases that they neither agreed with nor approved of. 

Some researchers have said there might be alternative explanations for the findings. The researchers have a Web site, www.tolerance.org /hidden_bias/, that lets visitors take a series of online tests of hidden biases.

In the Colorado studies, the researchers found that subjects' scores on a measure of racial prejudice were not linked with their performance in the shooting task. In one study, black participants were also more likely mistakenly to shoot unarmed black targets and were quicker to shoot black targets holding guns.

Dr. Park said those secondary findings were preliminary and needed to be confirmed by further research...

With Video Games, Researchers Link Guns to Stereotypes  
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/10/health/psychology/10RACE.html?ei=1&en
=51273aff3ebd9654&ex=1040545342&pagewanted=print&position=top 

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/10/health/psychology/10RACE.html?ex
=1040545342&ei=1&en=51273aff3ebd9654