White students who showed higher levels of racial prejudice on tests meant to gauge those attitudes had a harder time concentrating after talking with a black researcher than did their less-biased peers, a new study has found.
The study, which involved 59 students and was published last week in the journal Psychological Science, says the performance of biased students on a task that measured "executive function" skills dropped by almost two-thirds after conversations with a black researcher but not after conversations with a white researcher.
Students who ranked as less prejudiced had far smaller shifts in scores. Tests on how students assign associations to names and other characteristics linked to races measured hidden bias.
The researchers, Dr. Jennifer A. Richeson of Dartmouth and Dr. J. Nicole Shelton of Princeton, speculated that the strain of veiling prejudices might sap performance, because executive function - which requires organizing, thinking and attention - appears to be a limited resource. "When you have to control your behavior, it takes a lot of energy," Dr. Shelton wrote.
Dr. Richeson said a new study was examining the opposite phenomenon, the draining effects on blacks of dealing with bias.
"We believe that such processes may underlie the exhaustion often reported by racial minorities who work in all-white or nearly all-white offices," she said. "The findings of this study, by contrast, reveal a cost of prejudice that affects the `perpetrators,' the depletion of cognitive resources."
<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/06/health/psychology/06PREV.html> ***** -- Yoshie
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