One reason racism persists is that many people imagine they would respond strongly to a racist act but actually respond with indifference, a new study led by York University shows.

The research examines why acts of blatant racism against blacks still occur with alarming regularity, even though being labeled as a racist in modern society has become a powerful stigma.

"People do not think of themselves as prejudiced, and they predict that they would be very upset by a racist act and would take action," said lead author Kerry Kawakami, a psychology professor in York's Faculty of Health. "However, we found that their responses are much more muted than they expect when they are actually faced with an overtly racist comment."

Kawakami led the study at York with graduate student Francine Karmali. University of British Columbia professor Elizabeth Dunn, an expert on people's ability to predict their future emotional responses, and Yale University professor John Dovidio, an expert on prejudice, are co-authors.

In the study, students who think they are waiting for an experiment to begin are exposed to racism. Specifically, a white confederate makes a racist comment about a black confederate when he briefly leaves the room. When he returns, the actual participant is asked to choose a partner to work with on a subsequent exercise.

The researchers studied 120 non-black participants who volunteered for the experiment and either directly experienced a racial incident or had the incident described to them. The first group watched a black man, posing as a fellow participant, slightly bump a white confederate also posing as a participant. After the black man left the room, the white confederate either said nothing, or "I hate it when black people do that," or said, "clumsy n____." Other groups did not directly experience the event but either read about it or watched it on videotape and were asked to predict their responses to the events.

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The subjects who didn't experience the event were much more likely to report that they were upset at the white worker's slurs and to say they would not work with such a person. Those who actually experienced the event were less distressed and were as willing to work with the person who made racist comments as someone who did not.

Dovidio argues that participants who witness racism were much less willing to pay the emotional cost of confronting a racist than they thought they would be. That in turn means the racist pays less of a cost in social ostracism by expressing bias, he said.

"What we found was that students were more likely to choose the white confederate as a partner (63 per cent), despite the fact that the white person had made a racist comment about the black person," said Kawakami. "And the racist comments ranged from moderate to one of the most powerful anti-black slurs in the English language."

The findings may seem surprising at a time when America is about to inaugurate its first black president, but the election of one black man does not mean that racism is dead or that people will no longer tolerate acts of racism, Kawakami said.

Notably, there has been little research done on how people respond to prejudice toward others. However, University of British Columbia professor Elizabeth Dunn, one of the authors of the Science article, studies people's ability to predict their own affective and behavioural reactions.

"People often make inaccurate forecasts about how they would respond emotionally to negative events. They vastly overestimate how upset they would feel in bad situations such as hearing a racial slur," said Dunn. "One of the ways that people may stem the tide of negative emotions related to witnessing a racial slur is to re-construe the comment as a joke or as a harmless remark."

Further studies currently being conducted by these researchers are investigating how characteristics related to the racists and the target of prejudice increases or decreases emotional, behavioral, and physiological reactions to racial slurs. Examining people's perceptions of both the white and black confederate may provide important clues as to when people do and do not stand up against racism.