Tomoko Shimizu
Advisor: Dr. Sarah Dakin
SLU Festival of Science 2001 Oral Presentation
Research on Subtle Racism against Asians in a Caucasian Dominant
University
Abstract
Although many people tend
to think that racism has decreased recently, there are researchers who
argue that racism itself has not disappeared, but the form of racism has
changed. According to Frey and Gaertner (1986), “ ‘old fashioned’
or ‘rednecked’ forms of racism are being transmuted to a more subtle, indirect,
complex, and perhaps more insidious type of racial bigotory.” In
1980, Crosby, Brobley and Saxe conducted a meta-analysis examining helping
behavior. Two types of helping behavior were investigated. The face-to-face
condition included situations where the recipient asked the subject directly
for help. The remote condition contained situations where the recipient
asked for help indirectly (e.g. phone calls). The meta-analysis indicated
that subjects helped both the white and black recipients equally in the
face-to-face conditions. However, in the remote conditions, the subjects
helped white recipients significantly more often.
In this study we investigated the differences
in the degree of help offered depending upon the race of the help recipient.
The three independent variables were the race of the experimenter, the
race of the help recipient and the type of help requested. In the face-to-face
condition, subjects were asked to help a hypothetical blind student by
reading a chapter to her. In the non-face condition, subjects were asked
to record a chapter on tape. The help request was not given directly by
the experimenter so as not to influence the subjects’ decision. Instead,
there was a letter taped to the laboratory door. When the experimenter
arrived, she took it off the door and gave it to the subject explaining
that she did not know its contents. The subjects were then given personality
scales to fill out. The experimenter then left the room but returned a
few minutes later and told the subjects that if they were done with the
scales before they returned, they could open the letter since “it should
not influence their experiment.” By having the experimenter leave,
the subject was able to respond to the help request without the experimenters’
influence. In the envelope, there was a letter from the hypothetical
student, a letter from her school advisor, and a slip of paper to fill
out if they wished to help. The race of the student needing help
was manipulated by using an Asian name (Mei-Li Wang) or a Caucasian name
(Katherine Smith). The dependent variable was the amount of time participants
offered to help.
Results should indicate
no main effect for the experimenter condition, a main effect in the helping
condition and a main effect in the recipient’s race condition. The
non-face condition should have a higher degree of help compared to the
face condition and the Caucasian recipient will receive more help compared
to Asian recipients.