Prejudice regarding race and skin color in a university population in Brazil: implications of relational control procedures in the study of implicit attitudes

• Grant number: 18/06379-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: July 01, 2018
• End date: August 31, 2020
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Psychology - Experimental Psychology
• Principal Investigator: Nassim Chamel Elias
• Grantee: Weslen Chaves Rodrigues
• Host Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The characterization of population among races and the allocation of more or less privileges to individuals depending on the racial category is a social phenomenon observed and described in practically all modern Western cultures. Perception of an individual's skin color may, in certain contexts, determine how the other individuals will behave toward him or her. In Brazil, for example, it is known that the white population is not a numerical majority, but because of historical racist practices, white people still benefit from education, health and employment services to which, often, the non-white population has little or no access. From the analytic-behavioral point of view, racist practices comprise repertoires of socially learned behaviors that produce reinforcing consequences only for white people. Even within the non-white racial group itself, individuals whose skin color is darker tend to experience more situations of prejudice and disfavor, as well as more negative attitudes, than their lighter skin peers do. FAST (Functional Acquisition Speed Test) is an experimental procedure of implicit measurement whose dependent variable is a direct measure of the difference between the learning curves during blocks of consistent and inconsistent trials between stimuli and responses. The relationships between the stimuli "black people" or "white people" and certain positive and negative attributes are also the fruit of the history of social learning and cultural rules. It is possible to measure the strength and function of these relationships in the control of implicit attitude responses using FAST. Thus, the objective of this project is to verify if the FAST is an efficient procedure to measure implicit attitudes in questions that involve racial prejudice in Brazilian undergraduate students. Another objective is to establish a control group for other measures of implicit attitudes regarding variations of black skin tone with the same population. These variables will be checked in Condition 1. Condition 2 aims to verify if the effect measured by FAST will replicate when the consistent and inconsistent blocks present photos of faces of black people with different gradations of skin tone as a stimulus, being an experimental category formed by photos of people with light skin tones and the other category, by photos of people with dark skin tone.

Scientific publications

(References retrieved automatically from Web of Science and SciELO through information on FAPESP grants and their corresponding numbers as mentioned in the publications by the authors)

MIZAEL, TAHCITA MEDRADO; COELHO, CAROLINE LUIZA; RODRIGUES, WESLEN CHAVES; DE ALMEIDA, JOAO HENRIQUE. Racial Issues and Behavior Analysis: Experiences and Contributions From Brazil. BEHAVIOR AND SOCIAL ISSUES, AUG 2021. (18/06379-5, 14/50909-8, 08/57705-8, 20/02548-7)