Americans don’t hide their racism

By Kent R. Kroeger (March 12, 2019)

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This is the second essay in a series dedicated to analyzing the U.S. eligible-voter population using the 2018 American National Election Study (ANES), an online survey administered in December 2018 by researchers from the University of Michigan and Stanford University. __________________________________________________________________

How best to measure racism has long been debated in the political science, psychology and sociology research communities where the measures that have been developed inevitably meet with significant criticism.

The direct, self-reported method, in which researchers ask respondents directly whether they prefer their own race over others, is the most commonly used measure of individual racial bias. Using direct measures, research shows that individual racist beliefs have been in decline since the 1970s, according to longitudinal data from the General Social Survey.

Disputing this conclusion, some social scientists argue that social desirability bias —where respondents give answers based on what they believe to be ‘socially acceptable’ answers as opposed to how they actually feel — invalidate direct racism measures. However, recent research by University of…