Our Racist Heart? An Exploration of Unconscious Prejudice in Everyday Life

Few people today would admit to being a racist, or to making assumptions about individuals based on their skin colour, or on their gender or social class. In this book, leading psychologist Geoffrey Beattie asks if prejudice, more subtle than before, is still a major part of our everyday lives. Beattie suggests that implicit biases based around race are not just found in small sections of our society, but that they also exist in the psyches of even the most liberal, educated and fair-minded of us. More importantly, the book outlines how these ‘hidden’ attitudes and prejudices can be revealed and measured, and how they in turn predict behaviours in a number of important social situations. Our Racist Heart? takes a fresh look at our racial attitudes, using new technology and experimental approaches to show how unconscious biases influence our everyday actions and thinking. These groundbreaking results are brought to life using the author’s own experiences of class and religious prejudice in Northern Ireland, and are also discussed in relation to the history of race, racism and social psychological theory.

Part 1. Challenged by History1. Introduction: Approaches and Avoidances 2. A Room Steeped in the Past 3. Early lessons in Prejudice: Spoken and Unspoken 4. Who Needs a Negro? 5.The Nature of Prejudice Part 2. A Pipeline to the Soul? 6. The Times They Are a Changin’ (Or not, as the Case may be) 7. The Inner Conflict 8. How Much of our Attitude is Unconscious?9. Measuring the Conscious 10. A New Way into our Unconscious Attitude 11. By-passing the Conscious Mind Part 3. The Project Itself: Are we Implicitly Racist? 12. A New Test of Implicit Ethnic Bias 13. New Data on Possible Implicit Ethnic Bias 14. Am I Racist? 15. Why Aren’t We Saving the Planet?: Another Example of Unconscious Bias in Action16. How Ethnicity and Implicit Attitudes may Affect Shortlisting for University Posts17. So What Can We Do About All This? Appendix 1 Appendix 2

Geoffrey Beattie is Professor of Psychology at the University of Manchester and Visiting Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His previous work has either won or been shortlisted for a number of major awards. He has also presented several television series on BBC1, Channel 4 and UKTV.