Professor Gregory Huber and Kyle Peyton, Yale Law: “Racial Resentment, Prejudice, and Discrimination”

Professor Gregory Huber and Kyle Peyton, Yale Law
October 1, 2020

Professor Gregory Huber and Kyle Peyton, Yale Law, have published an article entitled “Racial Resentment, Prejudice, and Discrimination” in the Journal of Politics

Abstract:
“Political scientists regularly measure anti-Black prejudice in the survey context using racial resentment, an indirect measure that blends racial animus with traditional moral values. Explicit prejudice, a direct measure based in beliefs about the group-level inferiority of Blacks, is used less frequently. We investigate whether these  attitudes  predict anti-Black discrimination and  evaluations  of the  fairness  of  intergroup inequality. Study 1 used the Ultimatum Game (UG) to obtain a behavioral measure of racial discrimination and found whites  engaged  in  anti-Black  discrimination.  Explicit  prejudice  explained  which  whites  discriminated whereas resentment did not. In Study 2, white third-party observers evaluated intergroup interactions in the UG  and  explicit  prejudice  explained  racially  biased  fairness  evaluations,  but  resentment  did  not.  This demonstrates  that  resentment  and  prejudice  are  distinct  constructs,  and  that  explicit  prejudice  has  clear behavioral implications.  We  also  find  that explicit  prejudice is  widespread  among  white  Americans  and significantly less partisan than resentment.”