Mental representations of racial inequality in Germany

In everyday life, people gain impressions of social groups in our society through observations, encounters, stories and discourse. These shape mental representations of population groups that have little connection with their explicit prejudices in questionnaires. These so-called implicit attitudes are associations and reactions that arise automatically and often unconsciously when encountering a person or group of people (Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006). For example, many people think of stereotypical terms when they encounter or are exposed to images of racially labeled people. Recent findings show that implicit attitudes, rather than individual prejudice, may reflect and reinforce structural events, public discourses about groups, shared knowledge, and institutional racism (Banaji et al., 2021; Payne et al., 2017). The research object of the project is a) to make mental representations in the form of implicit attitudes measurable and b) to make their relationships to racism in social structures and everyday experiences visible.

Indirect measurement methods are used to measure mental representations. The foundation stone for the MIND.set project was therefore laid in a short study by the Racism Monitor. MIND. set has been a budget project of the DeZIM.lab since 2021 and is being further developed in close cooperation with the Experiments module of the Racism Monitor. MIND.set is a platform that enables indirect measurement methods to be integrated into online surveys in an uncomplicated way and without programming knowledge. Instead of direct questions and explicit response behavior, indirect measurement methods capture behavioral, automatic and spontaneous reactions of respondents that provide information about which associations with certain population groups are easily accessible and retrievable (Gawronski & Hahn, 2019). They thus offer the opportunity to collect mental representations without explicitly naming the target groups by using visual material. In doing so, they can avoid typical difficulties of explicit attitude measures, such as socially desirable response behavior or the requirement to be aware of one's own prejudices.

Indirect measurement methods only provide limited information about a permanent or situation-independent attitude of the respondents on an individual level. At group level, however, they describe shared associations in a social environment (Calanchini et al., 2022). Data from the USA from millions of respondents show, for example, that shared negative associations of white Americans towards Black Americans at the regional level are strongly related to current and historical racism (see e.g. Hehman et al., 2019; Payne et al., 2019). In order to investigate the social impact of mental representations, it is therefore important to include them in large-scale studies. So far, there is no corresponding data for Germany. In addition, it is unclear to what extent implicit attitudes in social environments also have direct tangible consequences for those affected that go beyond interactions with racially motivated individuals. For example, shared implicit attitudes towards a group in an environment could predict experiences of those affected in everyday interactions or structural disadvantage in institutions. The Racism Monitor, together with MIND.set, offers the opportunity to investigate this research question.

In order to close this research gap, the project investigates the extent to which indirect measurement methods reveal mental representations of certain population groups at regional level in Germany and links these with the perspectives and experiences of white and racially marked people. The MIND.set platform is intended to enable the use of indirect measurement methods in online surveys in order to investigate the causes and effects of implicit attitudes in large representative samples.

The plan is to implement the methods in the Racism Monitor. This will be the first time that indirect measurement methods with a focus on different population groups will be collected on a large scale in Germany and, in the medium term, their change over time will also be observed. Due to the overrepresentation of respondents potentially affected by racism in the sample, different perspectives can be taken into account and the results can be compared with the data of those affected.

As part of the development of the platform, a number of measures have already been taken to ensure optimal usability and high data quality for online surveys. In a validation phase, extensive evaluations of all measurement methods are being carried out to ensure that the mobile version functions smoothly and offers an optimal user experience. In addition, five different indirect measurement methods based on reaction times, decision-making behavior and information processing were tested. These methods and corresponding visual material were developed and tested specifically for the German context. The platform will be optimized on the basis of these evaluations.

Tests for the implementation of studies in the racism monitor will then be developed and used. The indirect measurement methods are collected and evaluated according to the latest scientific standards with regard to regional attitude patterns at district and federal state level (Calanchini et al., 2022; Hehman et al., 2019). The studies provide information on the relationship between mental representations of racialized minorities and experiences of discrimination in everyday interactions and authorities in Germany.

MIND.set is currently in the test phase and further development steps are being taken to expand and optimize its use. Five different measurement methods are available on the platform, which shed light on different forms of implicit attitudes: Implicit Association Test (Greenwald et al. 1998), Affect-Misattribution Procedure (Payne et al., 2005), Police Officer Dilemma (Correll et al., 2002), Avoidance Task (Essien et al., 2017), Source Monitoring Paradigm (e.g. Hechler et al., 20168).

Initial results show that different indirect measures could be successfully implemented via MIND.set. The integration of the five measurement methods in online surveys showed that the test methods also produce comparable results on mobile devices. These showed consistent stereotypical representations of racial minorities compared to the white majority society in reaction times to word and image pairings, in decision-making behaviour and in memory tasks. A first internal workshop has already taken place at DeZIM to enable access for other researchers.

Integration into the racism monitor makes it possible to gain information and insights into racist mental representations in society and to develop targeted measures to combat racism on this basis. The availability of the measurement methods can also be applied in cooperation with experts in specific contexts, such as in the healthcare context, which can influence the treatment of racially labeled patients (Forgiarini et al., 2011). Knowledge of context-specific implicit attitudes can be reflected upon and counteracted in a targeted manner (Hahn & Gawronski, 2019). Thus, awareness of them can be used for interventions against discrimination in organizations and ultimately also influence practitioners' decisions (Greenwald et al., 2022).

Indirect measurement methods: Cognitive psychology tests that collect associations or mental representations about reaction times, decision-making behavior and information processing mechanisms.

Implicit prejudices: Mental representations of social groups that reflect accessible and easily retrievable associations of groups with characteristics or evaluations (positive/negative).