Implicit Racial Bias in Europe: Cross-National Variation and Time Trends

Abstract

The authors visualize how implicit racial bias at the collective level varies across European countries and how it changed between 2009 and 2019. To obtain population-level estimates, the authors re-weight implicit association test data from the Project Implicit international dataset (n = 184,745). Implicit bias against Black people is stronger in southern and eastern vis-à-vis northern and western European countries. It decreased until the mid-2010s but started to increase thereafter.

Implicit racial biases are the positive or negative mental associations people automatically make when confronted with different racial groups (Fazio and Olson 2003). Although initially considered as a concept operating and measured at the individual level (Greenwald, McGhee, and Schwartz 1998), implicit bias has been recently theorized to work at the collective level. In the bias of crowds theory, implicit bias is viewed as a characteristic of social environments, which passes with “random error” through individuals (Payne, Vuletich, and Lundberg 2017). This corroborates with the sociological framework of new institutionalism, which states that landlords’ and employers’ discriminatory actions depend on their institutional contexts (Quillian and Midtbøen 2021).

Although a growing number of studies have examined aggregated implicit bias in the United States (e.g., Charlesworth and Banaji 2022a, 2022b; Chetty et al. 2020; Yoo et al. 2023), research in Europe remains scarce. Against this backdrop, we map population-level estimates for 18 European countries and present time trends between 2009 and 2019. To this end, we leverage individual-level data collected through implicit association tests (IATs) for race, which have been collected and recently released by Project Implicit (Charlesworth et al. 2023).

IATs examine the extent to which respondents associate pictures of White and Black faces with good and bad attributes and yield IAT D scores (Greenwald et al. 1998). Larger positive (negative) scores indicate more implicit racial bias favoring White (Black) people, although we find no negative country-level scores in the data. For more information about the IATs, see part 1 in the supplemental material. Analyses are restricted to the 184,745 respondents who identified as White or the dominant ethnic group in each country (e.g., native Dutch in the Netherlands) and without missing values on relevant sociodemographic covariates. As individuals who are female, young, higher educated, and politically liberal are overrepresented in the Project Implicit datasets (Charlesworth et al. 2023), we reweighted the data in such a way that they match with the country-specific population-level distributions in terms of sex, age, education, and political left-right placement (see part 2 in the supplemental material).

The average IAT D score in our European sample between 2009 and 2019 is 0.44. This is considerably higher than among White Americans, for whom this score decreased from 0.40 in 2007 to 0.31 in 2020, as reported in Charlesworth and Banaji (2022b). Figure 1 shows that implicit racial bias appears to be higher in Southern and Central European countries than in Northern and Western European countries. The highest D scores are observed in Italy (D = 0.52), Portugal (D = 0.51), and Romania (D = 0.48) and the lowest in Sweden (D = 0.33), the Netherlands (D = 0.34), and Norway (D = 0.35). Part 3 in the supplemental material provides all specific country scores and between-country differences. Bivariate analyses show statistically significant correlations (p < .10) between implicit racial bias at the country level (n = 18) and gross domestic product per capita (r = −0.66), the share of tertiary-educated individuals (r = −0.75), the proportion of foreign-born inhabitants (r = −0.45), the Gini coefficient of income inequality (r = 0.65), and the poverty rate (r = 0.51). Furthermore, the Project Implicit international data suggest that implicit racial bias declined between 2009 and 2015 but increased thereafter (see Figure 1). Most large European countries follow this U-shaped time trend, which may be the result of a changing public discourse about immigration since the so-called refugee crisis in 2015 and onward, among other things. We encourage future research to investigate the drivers of this variation in implicit bias across countries and time in the European context.

Figure 1.

Implicit racial bias in Europe: cross-national variation and time trends.

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-1-srd-10.1177_23780231241291131 – Supplemental material for Implicit Racial Bias in Europe: Cross-National Variation and Time Trends

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-srd-10.1177_23780231241291131 for Implicit Racial Bias in Europe: Cross-National Variation and Time Trends by Kasimir Dederichs and Pieter-Paul Verhaeghe in Socius