TY - JOUR
PY - 2020//
TI - Measuring racial status beliefs with implicit associations
JO - American sociological review
A1 - Melamed, David
A1 - Barry, Leanne
A1 - Montgomery, Bradley
A1 - Okuwobi, Oneya F.
SP - 1123
EP - 1131
VL - 85
IS - 6
N2 - Status distinctions have important consequences for most aspects of life, including inequalities in wealth, segregation, and interaction patterns in small groups. Much work documents such inequalities, but the mechanisms producing them are less understood. In our 2019 ASR article, "Status Characteristics, Implicit Bias, and the Production of Racial Inequality," we showed that a novel measure of implicit status beliefs explained some of the effect of race on social influence. The measure is based on an implicit association test (IAT) assessing the association between status and racial categories. In their comment, Bursell and Olsson (2020) assert that the IAT may be capturing evaluative bias, not status beliefs. Furthermore, Bursell and Olsson suggest our measure may work better for white compared to black participants. In this response, we review work in the sociology of culture and social psychology establishing the multidimensionality of cultural beliefs, and we present results from a new experiment, showing status and evaluations load on distinct underlying constructs.
RESULTS also show no racial differences in these measurement properties. We conclude with a discussion of ways to further refine the racial status IAT and the broader implications of this exchange.
Language: en
LA - en SN - 0003-1224 UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0003122420968553 ID - ref1 ER -