Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do

by Jennifer L. Eberhardt

The students didn’t know that the argument was scripted and the behavior staged, and that the person who did the shoving was intentionally either black or white. When the students were asked to rate the behavior of the two on a variety of dimensions, Duncan found striking differences based on race. When the person doing the shoving was black and the victim was white, 75 percent of the participants rated the behavior as “violent.” But when the person doing the shoving was white and the victim was black, only 17 percent of the students considered that same behavior “violent.” In fact, 42 percent of whites who shoved blacks were deemed to be simply “playing around”—but only 6 percent of blacks who shoved whites were categorized in that benign light. Duncan found that the students used a much lower threshold for labeling black actions as violent.