Study finds unconscious racial attitudes could play large role in 2012 prez polls

Washington, May 8 (ANI): A new study has revealed that racial attitudes could play a large role in the 2012 presidential election in America.

After Obama became president in the 2009, many proclaimed that the country had entered an era in which race was no longer an issue.

The study, led by psychologists at the University of Washington (UW), reveals that between January and April 2012 eligible voters who favoured whites over blacks, either consciously or unconsciously, also favoured Republican candidates relative to Barack Obama.

"People were saying that with Obama's election race became a dead issue, but that's not at all the case," lead investigator Anthony Greenwald, a UW psychology professor, said.

The findings in the study mean that many white and non-white voters, even those who do not believe they favour whites over blacks, might vote against Obama because of his race.

These voters could cite the economy or other reasons, but a contributing cause could nevertheless be their conscious or unconscious racial attitudes.

In the study, a majority of white eligible voters showed a pattern labeled "automatic white preference" on a widely used measure of unconscious race bias.

The 2012 data, collected from nearly 15,000 voters, showed that race was again a significant factor for candidate preferences.

Greenwald also measured unconscious race attitude using the Implicit Association Test (IAT), a tool that test thoughts that people don't realize they have.

Greenwald found that favouritism for Republican candidates was predicted by respondents' racial attitudes, both their self-reported views and their implicit biases measured by the IAT.

Another possibility is that Republican candidates' assertions that their most important goal is to remove Obama from the presidency "may have strong appeal to those who have latent racial motivation," Greenwald said. (ANI)