The Psychology of Bigotry 513of White Americans would presumably be, to varying extent,
ambivalent toward Black Americans. White Americans who
espouse a political philosophy of liberalism should be espe-
cially prone to aversive racism (Biernat, Vescio, Theno, &
Crandall, 1996).
As noted earlier, a second implication of aversive racism
theory is that in situations where discrimination would be
blatant and where the appropriate behavior is normative and
well-defined, White Americans would be unlikely to discrim-
inate against Black Americans because doing so would con-
tradict their allegedly nonprejudiced, egalitarian ideals and
self-images. However, in ambiguous situations where the dis-
crimination is less blatant or obvious, White Americans
should be more likely to be biased against Black Americans
because in that case they can do so without necessarily threat-
ening their self-images. This feature of aversive racism
theory—emphasizing the normative structure of situations as
a moderator variable for predicting when racially ambivalent
White Americans will or will not discriminate against Black
Americans—is perhaps its most unique and distinctive fea-
ture among ambivalence approaches (Biernat, Vescio, Theno,
& Crandall, 1996). These predictions have been amply sup-
ported in studies of White Americans, mostly college stu-
dents, by Dovidio, Gaertner, and their colleagues.
This supportive research has included studies of helping,
social cognition studies measuring reaction times linking the
words “white” and “black” to positive and negative stereo-
type characteristics, studies where pictures of Black and
White individuals’ faces are presented as primes (Dovidio &
Gaertner, 1986), research on juridic recommendations of the
death penalty in a capital case (Dovidio, Smith, Gershenfeld
Donnella, & Gaertner, 1997), and personnel selection recom-
mendations in 1989 and 1999 (Dovidio & Gaertner, 2000),
among others. In all of these studies, findings supported aver-
sive racism theory and were unaffected by whether the par-
ticipants had scored low or high on standard prejudice
measures, though high scorers on such scales often showed
greater bias toward Blacks than did low scorers.
What remains to be demonstrated by aversive racism the-
orists is that it is actually the conflict or tension between the
positive element of egalitarianism, or one hand, and negative
feelings toward Blacks, on the other, that constitutes the un-
derlying basis of ambivalence for White Americans’ attitudes
and behaviors toward Blacks and is the driving force behind
their discrimination of Blacks in ambiguous situations.
Indeed, egalitarianism is the value that perhaps most strongly
promotes tolerance and mitigates negative feelings toward
Blacks by White Americans. Presenting liberal-oriented U.S.
university students with an egalitarian message has been
shown by Biernat, Vescio, and Theno (1996) to elicit more
positive ratings of a Black stimulus person than a White one.
Whether egalitarianism promotes tolerance among indi-
viduals in countries other than the United States, however,
remains to be seen. With White participants from Portugal
and Brazil, Vala and Lima (2001) found that activating an
egalitarian norm affected perceptions and evaluations of a
White but not a Black stimulus person.
Although aversive racism theory has an excellent track
record in predicting a variety of cognitions and behaviors in
the social psychological laboratory, documenting the precise
nature of White Americans’ ambivalence toward Blacks
remains a task to be completed. Using recently developed
automatic processing techniques (described later) to assess
nonconscious feelings of antipathy toward Blacks (or other
oppressed group members) in conjunction with standard
value measures to assess egalitarianism and other potentially
race-relevant values may provide some useful leverage for
assessing aversive racism in White participants and for test-
ing the theory directly.Symbolic and Modern RacismClosely related to aversive racism theory are the constructs of
symbolicandmodern racismthat have been suggested by
several researchers, such as McConahay (1986) and Sears
(1988; Sears & Funk, 1991). The symbolic and modern
racism constructs originated because standard prejudice
scales of the 1950s and 1960s became increasingly problem-
atic for U.S. survey researchers in the 1960s and 1970s,
owing to social desirability issues (i.e., the transparency of
what they were measuring) and because they failed to predict
racially relevant political behavior, such as voting intentions
for capable Black candidates in elections where candidates of
both races were running and racism likely played a role in the
outcome (see Kinder & Sears, 1981).
What did predict voting and support for progressive racial
policies were attitude items reflecting an abstract, moral
tone that Black Americans were violating cherished White
American values such as individualism and the Protestant
ethic extolling the virtues of individual effort and hard
work—qualities White Americans often felt were lacking
among Black Americans. Ambivalence, then, arises because
many White Americans want to maintain a nonprejudiced
image even though they privately resent and dislike Blacks
and feel the racial discrimination toward Blacks in the United
States no longer exists. In protecting themselves from the
appearance of being prejudiced, symbolic or modern racists
justify their negative attitudes and behaviors toward Blacks
by invoking nonprejudiced explanations in the form of
American values or ideals. A symbolic or modern racist, for