Frank argued that the Reagan Democrats ought to vote their pocketbooks by supporting labor rights, progressive taxation, business regulation, health care reform, and other policies traditionally championed by the left. Republican politicians typically ask voters to vote their values—often defined by evangelical Christianity—ahead of class and pocketbook, particularly when it comes to issues such as abortion and the role of religion in public life. This is all perfectly acceptable grounds for disagreement. Liberals can disagree with someone who votes for president using abortion as a litmus test, and conservatives can disagree with voters who do not place religious values at the core of their political beliefs—but both sides have to acknowledge that these are all legitimate ways to determine one’s political choices. However, many Democratic pollsters have argued that the Reagan Democrats’ switch in political allegiance was not made on legitimate grounds. Rather, the switch was driven by an issue that we can all agree ought to be illegitimate in politics: racial bias.
Let’s start with what polls and electoral data tell us: If only white people could vote in U.S. presidential elections, the Republican candidate would always win. Democrats did not capture the majority of the white vote in a single presidential election between 1964 and 2008, including during back-to-back wins by Bill Clinton in the 1990s and Barack Obama’s “landslide” victory in 2008. Successful Democratic presidential candidates manage to split the white vote, or get close, and then win a majority among people of color. White men in particular have overwhelmingly drifted away from the Democratic party, and this trend more than any other has produced Republican victories in two thirds of the presidential elections held between 1964 and 2008.
If only white men were allowed to vote in elections in the United States today, it would be a complete waste of money to conduct an election at all. Pollsters will tell you that it is inconceivable for Democratic presidential candidates to win or even split the votes of white males. When successful Democratic candidates manage to split the overall white vote, it is usually because they reduce the magnitude of their loss among white men and gain an advantage among white women. For all of the talk of Barack Obama’s “post-racial” win in the 2008 presidential race, he would have lost in a landslide if the election had been limited to white voters. Obama won only 43 percent of the white vote nationwide and less than a third of white voters in the South. According to the National Election Pool exit poll, conducted by Edison/Mitofsky, only 28 pecent of Southern white men voted for Obama. Such numbers usually portend defeat for Democrats; Obama overcame his poor showing among white voters by racking up mammoth support among younger voters and people of color.
But the fact that whites—and white men in particular—tend to vote Republican is not sufficient to conclude that racial bias is at work. If you were to talk to the blue-collar voters of Macomb County who moved away from the Democratic party, most would emphatically tell you they were not motivated by racial animus. To many, even the suggestion would be offensive. And it is not as though Republican politicians make overt pleas to racial bias. Very often, race is never even mentioned in campaign materials, stump speeches, and party platforms. Most presidential elections, moreover, have featured two white males running against each other. So how do we know that the charge of race bias is not a fiction dreamed up by Democratic partisans who are unhappy that a group of voters have drifted away from their column?
Let’s look at the issues that many of these blue-collar voters themselves cite to explain why they drifted away from the Democratic party over the last quarter century. These voters gravitated toward conservative candidates before gay marriage and abortion became hot issues. Concerns about crime, welfare, and affirmative action topped their list of concerns starting in the 1970s, and it is these issues—along with more recent concerns about drugs and illegal immigration—that have provided Republican candidates with their most potent electoral weapons. Affirmative action has an explicitly racial component to it, so let’s leave it out of the discussion. But there is nothing inherently racial about welfare or crime, is there? You have white families on welfare and black families on welfare, law-abiding whites and law-abiding blacks, white criminals and black criminals. Who can disagree that there ought to be less crime and fewer people dependent on public assistance?
Conservatives have long provided a rational—if debatable—argument against welfare. They’ve argued that it provides perverse economic incentives for broken families and that it encourages laziness. If single mothers with children can get welfare while married mothers with children do not, does this not create an incentive for mothers to have their children raised in single-parent households? If you tie the size of a family’s welfare check to the number of children a single mother is supporting, doesn’t it create a perverse incentive for her to have many more children than she could raise successfully? And since welfare programs are directed primarily at the poor, doesn’t the regular arrival of a check from the government discourage the poor from working? If welfare recipients were to go out and get even a moderately well-paying job, the check would stop. These are the familiar talking points of the anti-welfare argument. Here is how the conservative Heritage Foundation puts it: “Higher welfare payments do not assist children; they increase dependence and illegitimacy, which have a devastatingly negative effect on children’s development. It is welfare dependence, rather than poverty, which has the most negative effect on children.”
Whatever your political views, and regardless of whether you agree with the Heritage Foundation’s thesis, all sensible people ought to be concerned about the potentially perverse effects of an ostensibly high-minded program.
In all of this discussion, voters and politicians emphatically tell us that race plays no role in their feelings about welfare. But is this true? This is precisely the kind of question that social psychologists have studied for decades. When people say bias plays no role, there are good reasons to believe they are telling pollsters what they believe to be true. They are not saying race is irrelevant when they secretly know it matters; in their hearts, these voters likely feel no racial animus. But that does not tell us what is going on in their hidden brains.
What kind of a mental image springs to the minds of these voters when you speak to them about welfare or crime? If race bias plays no role, it ought to be just as likely for white welfare recipients or white criminals to come to mind as black welfare recipients and black criminals.
Researchers have conducted a number of experiments along these lines. The basic idea behind the experiments is very simple. You divide a group of white voters at random into two groups and give them campaign materials criticizing welfare—using the race-neutral arguments of the Heritage Foundation. One group, however, hears about the problem through the use of an illustrative white family on welfare; another hears about the problem through an illustrative black family on welfare. If the debate around welfare is only about personal responsibility, dignity of work, and economic fairness, it should make no difference that one group sees a black family while another group sees a white family. The issue has nothing to do with race, so you would expect there would be just as many people in each of these groups who are persuaded that welfare is—or isn’t—a problem. On the other hand, if race is an issue—never explicitly mentioned, but a factor in the hidden brain—then the group that hears about the issue through an illustrative black family should end up being more critical of welfare than the group that hears about the problem through an illustrative white family. The same would go for crime. If lowering crime is a race-neutral issue, as it ostensibly ought to be, it ought to make no difference if you make a pitch about the importance of reducing crime to one group of voters using an illustrative black criminal and a pitch to another group of voters using an illustrative white criminal.
Martin Gilens at Princeton University once conducted an experiment along these lines. He asked a number of white Americans about their views on welfare. He then gave them an example of a woman i
n her thirties who had a ten-year-old child and was on welfare. Gilens told some volunteers—picked at random—that the woman was black, and told others that the woman was white. He asked all the respondents their overall views on welfare. Gilens found that volunteers had about the same level of negativity toward the white welfare mom as toward the black welfare mom—which seemingly supports the Heritage Foundation’s argument that opposition to welfare is race-neutral. But Gilens found that negative attitudes toward the black welfare mom played a more powerful role than negative attitudes toward the white welfare mom in driving people’s overall views about welfare. Seeing the benefits of welfare accrue to a black woman made volunteers significantly more hostile to welfare as a whole than seeing benefits accrue to a white woman. Gilens also found that volunteers told about a welfare mom whose race was not identified automatically tended to invoke an image of a black woman rather than a white woman, even though there were more whites on welfare than blacks. More African Americans are on welfare as a proportion of the overall black population than is the case with whites, but if I sit a welfare recipient behind a screen and ask you to guess his or her race, it is absolute numbers that count, not ratios. Since there are more whites who receive welfare than blacks, the odds are that the person behind the screen will be white. Why do so many people believe the person will be black?
Gilens eventually concluded that unconscious racial attitudes were the single most important determinant of welfare views among his white volunteers. It was not that their opinions about self-reliance and individualism did not matter; they did. But if you took a group of people with the same views about self-reliance, hard work, and personal responsibility and talked to them about welfare, they were much more likely to automatically visualize a black person than a white person. Thinking about a black person, moreover, prompted many more people to decide they were against welfare in general, because negative opinions about blacks on welfare were more potent than negative opinions about whites on welfare.
What does this mean if you are a political strategist or a politician who is hoping—cynically or instinctively—to take advantage of racial bias? It means that all you have to do is talk about welfare in general, and voters’ hidden brains will do the rest for you. This does not mean that every politician who expresses a concern about “welfare queens” is motivated by race bias. The insidious thing is that it is impossible to tell whether a given politician is raising a concern about welfare because of his or her ideological beliefs about self-reliance or because he or she is trying to exploit racial bias—or both. Short of conducting an experiment, it is similarly impossible to tell if a given voter’s views stem from a belief in self-reliance or from racial bias, or both. You can instantly see why this is a potent political tool. Racial appeals can now be embedded in a conversation that ostensibly has nothing to do with race.
The same phenomenon is true with crime. George H. W. Bush’s use of the “Willie Horton” ad in the 1988 presidential election is widely credited with his demolition of Democrat Michael Dukakis. Horton was a convicted murderer in Massachusetts who raped and stabbed a Maryland woman while on a weekend furlough. Dukakis, as governor of Massachusetts, inherited the furlough program from a prior governor and eventually shut it down, but Bush painted him as being slow to dismantle the program and therefore soft on crime. Much was made of the ad because it lingered on the image of Horton’s black face, and Bush was accused of exploiting racial bias. But the photo was just the icing. It’s hardly necessary to show a black man’s face to evoke the image of a black criminal in the minds of white voters; all you have to do is talk about crime in general and their hidden brains will supply a picture of a violent black man.
Many other issues work the same way. Everyone can agree that the drug trade has devastated communities, but if talk about drugs unconsciously and automatically evokes an image of black people smoking crack rather than white people snorting cocaine or if people have greater fears about drug dealers who are black or brown than about drug dealers who are white, you can exploit race bias without ever making a reference to race. Ditto for illegal immigration. If talk of “illegal aliens” brings a Hispanic person to mind rather than a white immigrant, or if Hispanic illegal immigrants conjure a more threatening and malevolent picture in our minds than white illegal immigrants, you can appeal to race bias without ever mentioning—even to yourself—that the real problem you have with illegal immigration is brown people.
The psychologist Robert W. Livingston once told volunteers about a crime in which a Milwaukee woman had been severely injured following an assault by an illegal immigrant. Some volunteers were told the criminal was from Canada and named David Edmonds. Others were told the criminal was from Mexico and named Juan Luis Martinez. Livingston asked his volunteers to play juror and decide on an appropriate prison sentence. The volunteers recommended a longer prison sentence for the Mexican, even though both fictional illegal immigrants had committed exactly the same crime.
Once people’s attitudes are influenced by bias, even their basic perception of facts can change. In 1982, at a time when Ronald Reagan was drumming up concerns about welfare, a CBS/New York Times survey asked people this question: “Of all the people who are poor in this country, are more of them black or are more of them white?” More than half of all Americans believed there were more poor black people than poor white people in the United States. African Americans at the time constituted 28 percent of Americans who were poor, according to U.S. Census Bureau definitions of poverty.
In a more recent survey of Illinois voters some years ago, when the issue of welfare reform was very hot, more than 60 percent of respondents overestimated—by a factor of 100 percent—the number of Americans who were on welfare. One in three volunteers grossly overestimated the number of African Americans on welfare, and two in five overestimated the size of welfare payments that families received. Ninety percent of the respondents greatly overestimated the amount of the federal budget spent on welfare. The errors were not small. There was not one factual question related to welfare where the majority of respondents got the right answer, or even came close. Americans believed that welfare recipients were more numerous, more lucratively compensated, and more likely to be black than the facts warranted. Those who made the largest errors, and believed the most inaccurate facts, were often the most confident about the accuracy of their views. It was all the doing of the hidden brain, of course—and a gold mine for politicians willing to exploit such bias.
“All of us can agree there are issues that are not matters of preference but matters of fact,” Mahzarin Banaji once told me. “The reason this is powerful is, it shows our minds will not just distort our preferences, but distort facts.”
I believe that, like bias among Frances Aboud’s preschoolers, voters can end up with racial bias in adulthood without ever intending to be biased, without anyone deliberately instilling bias in their hearts, and with everyone trying their utmost not to be biased. I am not suggesting that political campaigns do not explicitly exploit racial fears by talking about welfare, crime, and illegal immigration; they do. But the reason those campaigns work is that when you talk about those issues, it is minorities who automatically spring to the minds of many voters.
Why do so many Americans automatically think of a black criminal or a black welfare recipient when they think about crime and welfare? The fact that disproportionate numbers of African Americans are poor and do get in trouble with the law does not explain why so many people automatically bring blacks to mind during discussions of crime and welfare. As the Illinois survey showed, many people don’t merely think more blacks as a proportion of the black population receive welfare than do whites, they overestimate the absolute number of blacks on welfare. If the perception of black poverty and criminality is out of line with the statistical evidence, where does it come from?
Part of the answer has been well-explored: Media representations of criminals and welfare recipients are often skewed. Media cov
erage regularly reflects existing stereotypes—the black murderer seems more newsworthy than the white murderer—and the heightened news coverage of certain crimes in turn strengthens the stereotype.
But I believe there is a more important explanation, and it is rather mundane. (As I said at the start, we seek dramatic explanations for dramatic phenomena. Much of the hidden brain’s power, however, lies in the fact that its influence is subtle and mundane.) Even if media coverage were not biased and the proportion of people on welfare and in trouble with the law were absolutely identical among all ethnic groups, large numbers of Americans would still mentally inflate the number of minorities who are poor or violent and undercount the number of whites who are poor or violent. Minorities have a disproportionate risk of being linked with negative associations for no better reason than that they are minorities.
You can show this in everyday settings that are less emotionally charged than welfare and crime. Divide a group of one hundred people into two groups, A and B, with eighty of them assigned to group A and twenty of them assigned to group B. Make everyone in group A wear red and everyone in group B wear blue—so that every person’s group membership is visible and easily identifiable. Tell all the people about ten instances when members of these groups took an unauthorized cookie from the cookie jar; eight of the cookie stealers were from group A and two from group B. If you later ask people in group A to guess the total number of cookie stealers in each group, they are likely to overestimate the number of cookie stealers in group B and underestimate the number of cookie stealers in group A. They may even feel that there are a larger number of cookie stealers in group B than in group A. When you mention cookie stealing to someone from group A, a person from group B can come more readily to mind. People in group A, in other words, can greatly overestimate the number of cookie stealers in group B for no better reason than that group B is smaller than group A—and everyone belonging to groups A and B are clearly identifiable.
The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives Page 23