Page 326 - The Social Animal

308 The Social Animal

In an important set of experiments, Carl Word and his associ-
16
ates trained white Princeton students to interview applicants for a
job. Huge differences emerged in the way interviewers interacted
with black and white applicants: When the applicant was black, the
interviewer unwittingly sat slightly farther away, made more speech
errors, and terminated the interview 25 percent sooner than when
the applicant was white. In short, interviewers were uncomfortable.
Do you suppose this had an effect on the performance of the job ap-
plicants? Let’s take a look. In a second experiment, Word and his col-
leagues trained their interviewers to treat white students in the same
manner that the interviewers had treated either the white applicants
or the black applicants in the previous experiment. The experi-
menters videotaped the students being interviewed. Independent
judges rated those who had been treated like the black applicants as
being more nervous and less effective than those treated like the
white applicants. The results of this experiment lead us to suspect
strongly that when women or minority-group members are being in-
terviewed by a white male, their performance may suffer, not because
there is anything wrong with them but because, without necessarily
intending it, the interviewer is likely to behave in a way that makes
them uncomfortable.
The kind of subtle racism I’m describing is exactly what David
Frey and Samuel Gaertner 17 discovered when they looked at the
helping behavior of whites toward a black individual. In their study,
they found that white subjects were just as willing to help a black stu-
dent as a white student, but only when the person needing help had
demonstrated sufficient effort. When white students were led to be-
lieve that the student had not worked hard enough at the task, they
were more likely to refuse a black student’s request for help than a
white student’s. These findings suggest that subtle racism tends to
emerge when it can be easily rationalized: It would be hard to justify
refusing to help a minority person whose need for help stemmed
from circumstances beyond his or her control—without feeling and
looking like a bigot. But when withholding help seems more reason-
able—such as when the person asking for help is “lazy”—people can
continue to act in prejudiced ways while protecting their images of
themselves as unprejudiced.
If you were applying for a job, how would you be treated by your
potential employers if they had prior information that you were gay