In other words, the more offensive the mascot, the greater the effect.Īnd just like in our lab, liberal participants were particularly sensitive to the influence of the Native American mascot. Using the same implicit measures as our earlier study, residents of Cleveland were more likely to associate Native Americans with warlike traits than residents of Atlanta, Detroit and Miami. (Detroit, home of the Tigers, and Miami, which houses the Marlins, were used as control cities.) We decided to focus on the Cleveland and Atlanta media markets because the Native American mascots of their baseball teams - the Indians and the Braves - were considered the most and least offensive examples, respectively, according to a pre-experiment survey. Indeed, our results showed that people living in cities with Native American mascots were more likely to think of Native Americans as warlike. If the media market you live in determines how often you’re exposed to a Native American sports mascot, we would expect to see differences in attitudes toward Native Americans between people who live in cities with Native American-themed sports franchises and people who don’t. These lab results prompted us to try to replicate our findings in a real world setting. And in our study, we found a stereotypical mascot could significantly degrade liberals' attitudes toward Native Americans. But liberals also have been shown to have more malleable worldviews and be more open to new information. Interestingly, the liberal participants in our studies were more affected by Native American mascots than were their conservative peers.īecause liberals often think of themselves as being less susceptible to racial bias, this might seem counterintuitive. And it's all the more pernicious because the people making these biased decisions are unlikely to be aware that they're doing so. Implicit bias can influence decisions ranging from hiring practices to jury preferences and criminal sentencing. Our participants were either unwilling to admit or unaware of the mascot’s influence on their views of Native Americans their bias was implicit, either hidden or incognizant. This difference in results represents something called implicit bias, which often takes place when asking people about socially sensitive subjects such as race or gender. When asked directly, participants, regardless of the mascot they saw, reported no differences in how warlike they thought Native Americans were.īut when participants completed an indirect - or implicit - stereotype measure, those who'd viewed the Native American mascot were more likely to associate warlike qualities with Native Americans. ![]() ![]() We then measured how strongly all participants associated Native Americans with "warlike," a stereotype leveraged by many sports teams that use Native mascots ("Braves," "Warriors"). In our lab, we showed participants an unfamiliar mascot some were shown a Native American image, while others were shown an image of an animal. ![]() Perhaps more disturbingly, people aren't even aware that this subtle reinforcement is taking place. Our research has shown that incidental exposure to Native American sports mascots can reinforce stereotypes in people.
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