Measuring Racial Status Beliefs with Implicit Associations

Abstract

Status distinctions have important consequences for most aspects of life, including inequalities in wealth, segregation, and interaction patterns in small groups. Much work documents such inequalities, but the mechanisms producing them are less understood. In our 2019 ASR article, “Status Characteristics, Implicit Bias, and the Production of Racial Inequality,” we showed that a novel measure of implicit status beliefs explained some of the effect of race on social influence. The measure is based on an implicit association test (IAT) assessing the association between status and racial categories. In their comment, Bursell and Olsson (2020) assert that the IAT may be capturing evaluative bias, not status beliefs. Furthermore, Bursell and Olsson suggest our measure may work better for white compared to black participants. In this response, we review work in the sociology of culture and social psychology establishing the multidimensionality of cultural beliefs, and we present results from a new experiment, showing status and evaluations load on distinct underlying constructs. Results also show no racial differences in these measurement properties. We conclude with a discussion of ways to further refine the racial status IAT and the broader implications of this exchange.