Recent racial attitude research has focused on whites' increasing support for the principles of racial equality and lack of support for programs meant to bring about racial equality. As one explanation for this gap some researchers have hypothesized that a new form of symbolic racism with origins in early-learned feelings of individualism and antiblack affect is taking the place of traditional prejudice. According to symbolic racism theory, whites oppose programs such as affirmative action out of moral resentment toward blacks for not living up to traditional protestant values. However, longitudinal studies of racial attitudes continue to focus on whites increased support for the principles of equality. No study has focused on symbolic racism over time. Using data from the American National Election Studies I analyze symbolic racism among whites from the years 1986-2000 by decomposing the time trend into its attitudinal change and cohort replacement components. Results of the analyses support the view that symbolic racism is not decreasing, and has actually increased slightly since 1986. Results of the analysis do not support the view that symbolic racism has origins in early-learned feelings such as antiblack affect. In fact, the effect of antiblack affect on symbolic racism is decreasing over time as symbolic racism is increasing. Based on this finding, an alternative conceptualization of symbolic racism that places the origins of racial prejudice in competition between groups for status and not in feelings and emotions is offered. / Master of Science

The study and measurement of attitudes toward racial and ethnic groups are important parts of the field of cross-cultural psychology. The present study examined a theory of racial attitudes, that of symbolic racism, and several demographic variables. The sample population consisted of 575 Caucasians and 122 Far-East Asian college students. Results indicated that Symbolic Racism is a unique theoretical construct, that Caucasian students were less racially biased than their Asian peers, and that group differences in racial attitudes existed across religious affiliation, number of reported interracial friendships, and gender.

Television often portrays African Americans in unfavorable positions in comparison to Caucasians. Typically these unfavorable depictions reinforce negative stereotypes associated with African Americans. Research indicates that television portrayals can influence people’s attitudes toward one another. A question left unanswered by current research: are mass-mediated images as influential at reversing or counteracting stereotypes as they are at reinforcing them? An experiment with undergraduate students was conducted to investigate the relationship between the positive portrayal of African Americans and subsequent racial attitudes. Participants viewed a video clip with either an African American or Caucasian chairman for the Georgia Division of Public Health. The clip included a still photograph of the chairman and was accompanied by a pre-recorded voice addressing treatments for lung cancer patients. At the beginning of each class, professors showed students the video after which the class lecture proceeded as scheduled. Just before the class ended a researcher entered the class and told students he/she was doing a survey on racial attitudes. Students were then given a questionnaire regarding racial attitudes toward African Americans. Between the time of the video viewing and the completion of the survey, students were not informed that one was related to the other. Subjects also completed an evaluation of the speaker in the video and of the health message.

This thesis aimed to investigate the changing nature, expression and measurement of contemporary racist attitudes, discriminatory behaviours and racial stereotypes in an Australian context. The first principal aim of this thesis was to further establish the psychometric properties of the Symbolic Racism Extended Scale (Fraser & Islam, 1997b). Study 1 revealed good psychometric properties for the Symbolic Racism Extended Scale as a measure of symbolic (modern) racist attitudes in Australian populations. The study also found support for incorporating modern racism items within a 'social issues' questionnaire format to reduce reactivity concerns associated with self-report measures. The second principal aim of this thesis (Studies 2 and 3) was to explore the nature, prevalence and potential sources of contemporary racist attitudes, and associated discriminatory behaviours, in an Australian context. Study 2 detected a sizeable proportion of modern racist attitudes in both the University and ACT Secondary College student samples. The nature of modern racist attitudes in the population samples maintained clear consistencies with key tenets of contemporary theories of racial prejudice. Overall the study provided further empirical evidence of the nature, tenets and potential socio-demographic sources of modern racist attitudes in Australian populations. Study 3 explored modern racists' discriminatory behaviours in conditions of low racial salience. In an employment-hiring task, high and low prejudiced participants (university undergraduates) revealed significantly different employment hiring preferences for an Aboriginal applicant. In providing Australian empirical evidence of modern racists' discriminatory behaviours, the study also discussed methodological implications for future Australian research investigating the discriminatory behaviours of modern racists. The third principal aim of this thesis was to provide further analysis of the measurement of contemporary racist attitudes, specifically to examine concerns pertaining to the measurement of racial attitudes through implicit techniques. Implicit free-response measurement of Australian racial stereotypes in Study 4 revealed that high and low prejudiced participants (as measured by the SR-E) were equally knowledgable of the cultural stereotypes of Aboriginals, Asians and immigrants. Cultural knowledge of the implicit stereotypes was found to be predominantly independent of prejudicial beliefs, lending support to concerns (Devine, 1989; Devine & Elliot, 1995) that implicit measures of racial prejudice may actually be measuring an individual's cultural knowledge of the primed racial group, rather than his or her prejudicial beliefs. The fourth principal aim of this thesis was to investigate the content of Australian racial stereotypes. Study 4 revealed the implicit content of the cultural stereotypes of Aborigines, Asians and immigrants to be predominantly negative in nature. In response to the predominantly negative content of the Aboriginal cultural stereotype, Study 5 investigated whether the recategorising of ingroup boundaries and disconfirming information, relating to Aboriginal Australians, observed in the recent Sydney Olympic Games would result in changes to the content of the cultural stereotype. The study found significant decreases and increases in the negative and positive traits respectively reported as being part of the cultural stereotype of Aborigines, two weeks following the Sydney Olympic Games. Together, the five studies contributed to empirical research on the changing nature, expression and measurement of contemporary racist attitudes, discriminatory behaviours and racial stereotypes in Australian populations. A number of theoretical and practical implications of the present findings for Australian prejudice research are addressed and discussed. Furthermore, a number of practical recommendations for future research are identified to further investigate the modern nature of racist attitudes in Australian populations.