Ideology and the Affective Structure of Whites’ Racial Perceptions

The present study tests the hypothesis that deviations from “affective bipolarity” in the relationship between the positive and negative dimensions of whites’ stereotypes of blacks—such as racial ambivalence—should be stronger among conservatives. Across two different data sets (the 2000 National Election Study and the 1991 National Race and Politics Study) and three different methodologies (heteroskedastic regression, confirmatory factor analysis, and a regression analysis of attitude-ambivalence scores), this hypothesis was supported. Further analyses indicated that the relationship between conservatism and ambivalent perceptions of blacks was mediated by conflict between humanitarian and individualistic concerns in the racial context, but not in the abstract. The study of racial perceptions has developed into one of the most fruitful areas of social science research on racial and ethnic attitudes. Among other things, research on stereotypical perceptions of various racial and ethnic groups has documented their content (Devine and Elliott 1995; Schuman et al. 1997; Sniderman and Carmines 1997), their origins (Fiske 1998), and their impact on information processing (for reviews see Blair 2001; and Fiske 1998). More recently, researchers have also begun to take an interest in the relationship between the positive and negative dimensions of whites’ stereotypical perceptions of blacks. Although positive and negative stereotypical perceptions are perhaps most easily thought of as “bipolar” or “reciprocally related”—with the acceptance of positive perceptions implying the rejection of negative perceptions and vice versa—research differs as to whether this is CHRISTOPHER M. FEDERICO is Assistant Professor of Psychology and Political Science at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Portions of this paper were presented at the annual meetings of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, Illinois, April 2004, and the International Society for Political Psychology, Lund, Sweden, July 2004. The author would like to thank the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research for the 2000 National Election Study data; the Survey Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, for the 1991 National Race and Politics Study data; and Patricia Devine, Damla Ergun, Paul Goren, Brad Lippman, Robert Livingston, Peter Miller, David Sears, and James Shah for their comments and suggestions. Address correspondence to the author; e-mail: [email protected]. at U nirsity of M inesota on O cber 2, 2010 poq.oxjournals.org D ow nladed fom