1. Throughout the course of United States history, racial and ethnic categories have been particularly important dimensions of identity. For most of this time, racial categories have been clearly demarcated (e.g., one was either Black or White). Recently, however, the boundaries between these different categories have started to fray. We focus on individuals who do not self-identify with only one race but rather choose the term “biracial” or “multiracial” to describe themselves. Specifically, we compare the performance of Blacks, Whites, Black/White biracials, and other multiracials on 11 Implicit Association Tests: Abled/Disabled Good/Bad Asian/White American/Non-American Black/White Good/Bad (with adult faces) Black/White Good/Bad (with child faces) Black/White Weapons/Tools Gay/Straight Good/Bad Light Skinned/Dark Skinned Good/Bad Male/Female Career/Family Male/Female Science/Arts Native American/White American/non-American Thin/Overweight Good/Bad Conclusions Multiracials show less bias than either Blacks or Whites on tests concerning racial groups that are neither Black nor White. Multiracials also show the least amount of preference for the socially dominant group on some non-race-related tests. On race-related tests where the target groups are Black and White, multiracials show a lower preference for Whites and lower stereotypic associations with Whites than do White participants. This pattern is also seen on the weight test, a pattern that may reflect the racialized nature of weight (e.g., Black men and women tend to be more accepting of larger women, Hebl & Heatheron, 1998; Hebl & Turchin, 2005). These results may reflect the multifaceted experience of multiracials; their IAT score reflects their blended racial identity. On tests of non-race stereotypes, the three groups tested here exhibit nearly identical IAT scores. Multiracial status may not influence implicit stereotypes that are not race- related, though more research is needed to determine whether this effect holds across a variety of non-race-related stereotypes or is specific to gender-related tests. Regression analyses revealed that on most tests, race explained a greater amount of variance in IAT scores than did political orientation. However, on the three non-race- related attitude tests (disability, sexuality, and weight), political orientation explained a greater amount of variance than did race. In conclusion, multiracials exhibit a bias that is in between that shown by Blacks and Whites on tests which concern Black and White racial identity. On multiple other IATs, multiracials appear to exhibit different biases than self- identified Blacks and Whites. However, this finding is limited to particular domains. Introduction Results Methods References Acknowledgments Multiracials May Be Extra Egalitarian: Evidence from the Implicit Association Test Larisa Heiphetz 1, Christopher Dial 1, Brian A. Nosek 2 & Mahzarin R. Banaji 1 1 Harvard University; 2 University of Virginia Implicit attitudes or stereotypes that run counter to those commonly found in the culture at large can be conceptualized in two ways: A score near the zero point, indicating a lack of preference for either category (on attitude tests) or a lack of stereotypic association (on stereotype tests); or A negative score, indicating a preference for the non-dominant group (on attitude tests) or an implicit belief counter to prevailing cultural stereotypes (on stereotype tests). Thus, a group that shows less bias as compared with another group is not necessarily unbiased in an absolute sense (e.g., the lowest mean scores on many IATs presented above are still above zero). Greenwald, A. G., McGhee, D. E., & Schwartz, J. L. K. (1998). Measuring individual differences in implicit social cognition: The implicit association test. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 1464-1480. Hebl, M. R., & Heatheron, T. F. (1998). The stigma of obesity in women: The difference is black and white. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 24, 417-426. Hebl, M. R., & Turchin, J. M. (2005). The stigma of obesity: What about men? Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 27, 267-275. Nosek, B. A., Smyth, F. L., Hansen, J. J., Devos, T., Lindner, N. M., Ranganath, K. A., Smith, C. T., Olson, K. R., Chugh, D., Greenwald, A. G., & Banaji, M. R. (2007). Pervasiveness and correlates of implicit attitudes and stereotypes. European Review of Social Psychology, 18, 36-88. We wish to thank Kristina Olson, Katie Lancaster, and Alicia Prince for their input and assistance with this project. Participants were Internet users who visited one of the following four websites between 2000 and 2006. http://yale.edu/implicit http://implicit.harvard.edu http://tolerance.org http://understandingprejudice.org Participants completed one or more Implicit Association Tests (IATs; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998) from among 17 available domains. Our sample includes 2,636,368 completed tests from the 11 domains presented here. The relevant IATs measured attitude and stereotype associations across a variety of social categories including race, weight, skin tone, gender, sexuality, and disability. The mean age of our sample was 26.20 years and ~62% of the sample was female. By race: Black: N ≈ 150,113 White: N ≈ 1,436,478 Black/White biracial: N ≈ 22,807 Other multiracial: N ≈ 76,799 Tests include: Asian IAT Disability IAT Native IAT Sexuality IAT Tests include: Child-Race IAT Race IAT Skin Tone IAT Weapons IAT Weight IAT Tests include: Gender-Career Gender-Science