Study finds biased global downturn on stigmatized groups

In a study of explicit and implicit biases on stigma groups in 33 countries between 2009 and 2019, the researchers found that explicit, self-reported biases on all stigmas they examined were significantly reduced: age, race, weight, skin color, skin color, and sexual orientation. However, images of implicit bias are sometimes described as “hidden” or “automatically revealed” bias, but more diverse.

New discoveries are reported in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

“We used data from Intimit Project Intimit, a website established in the early 2000s, which is both a place to educate people about implicit processes and a website to collect data,” said Benedek Kurdi, professor of psychology at Urbana-urbana-Champaign, Illinois. The data were collected from 1.4 million participants from 33 countries from the Northern Hemisphere, and also from Argentina, Australia and Brazil.

Curdi said clear bias is the way people are willing to share their attitudes toward other groups or individuals. Implicit bias is revealed in other ways.

“This is usually a task for people to perform behavior,” he said. “For example, it might be asked to classify images and words and based on how quickly they can do that, we can infer their attitude.”

For example, a person may associate younger, thin or skinned people with positive traits, while being more likely to associate older, heavier or darker skin tones with more negative attributes.

“If you take tests like the implicit association test, you have fewer chances of consciously controlling your response,” he said.

In analyzing data from Americans, previous studies have found that self-reported biases tend to decline significantly over various stigmatized groups.

“Since 2007, respondents in the U.S. have shown fewer anti-coloring/fat/pro-Pro-Pro-thin, anti-gay/pro-pro-pro-pro-thin, anti-black skin/anti-black skin and anti-black/pro-white attitudes,” the authors of the new study wrote. “These findings are consistent with similar, well-documented trends obtained in representative U.S. surveys…and may reflect the norms of change in the acceptability of negative effects on stigmatized population expression.”

US data on certain types of implicit bias also show a downward trend.

“Specifically, the bias of implicit attitudes has dropped by 65%, and is now close to neutral. There are also implicit race and skin color attitudes. [showed declines in bias]although slower, still noteworthy speeds are 26% and 25%, respectively,” the researchers wrote.

However, implicit biases related to weight and age are still high in the United States.

Kurdi and his colleagues hope to compare U.S. data with more global trends to see if the same pattern prevails. To this end, they expanded their research to include responses from 1.4 million people from around the world. The data were collected from people in Argentina, Australia, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Colombia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Serbia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkey and the United Kingdom.

When they analysed international responses, the researchers saw some similar trends to those in the United States, but there were some important differences.

“We looked at self-reported biases about age, weight, sex, skin color and race,” Kurdi said. “For each of them, people reported less bias, and they reported more equal social attitudes. But when you look at implicit attitudes, there is more variability.”

Between 2009 and 2019, self-reported bias has gradually declined worldwide. At the low end, bias against people with higher weight dropped by 18%, with the most dramatic decline in sexually-related biases, down 43% during this period. Self-reported bias related to age, skin color, and race also declined.

However, the international trend of implicit bias is more variable. Between 2009 and 2019, implicit bias related to sex decreased by 36%, while implicit bias related to age, race, and weight remained stable. Implicit bias related to skin tone declined, but then increased again, eventually increasing by about 20%.

Kurdi said that prejudice and prejudice related to skin color differ from one another in many parts of the world, where lingering cultural traditions, such as caste systems or history of dark skin color bias against the same race, often persisted.

“In the United States, the black and white racial divide is the main racial difference,” Kurdi said. While in other countries, social stigma may be mainly associated with lighter or darker skin tones.

Kurdi said the main revelation of the study is that explicit and implicit bias is ductile. These changing attitudes may reflect the descriptions of members of traditionally stigmatized groups in popular media and news.

Researchers found that in the United States and internationally, the biggest reduction in bias involves attitudes towards homosexuals.

“Not only the average is changing, but almost every country in the dataset is changing the bias of sexual attitudes,” Kurdi said. “This may be the result of several factors, including social movements, people coming out, and homosexuals’ representation in the media becoming more frequent and more diverse.”

“Even with the U.S. data, I was very surprised that even implicit attitudes can change so quickly and fundamentally in such a short time,” Kurdi said. “It seems like the fact that is happening – it’s happening not only in this country, but on a more global scale, and that also surprises me.”

Kurdi is also a professor at the Beckman Institute of Advanced Science and Technology in the United States.