Several studies have shown that living with a roommate of a different race changes students’ attitudes. One, from the University of California at Los Angeles, generally found decreased prejudice among students with different-race roommates — but those who roomed with Asian-Americans, the group that scored the highest on measures of prejudice, became more prejudiced themselves.
And why might that be, you ask? From the study:
Why does contact with Asian Americans increase
prejudice?What could be causing the increased prejudice as a
result of intensified random and voluntary contact with
Asian American students? One obvious possible answer
to this question is peer socialization. Specifically, peer
socialization studies indicate that students are likely to
modify their attitudes and behaviors to be consistent
with those of their peers (Feldman & Newcomb,
1969). If Asian American students have significantly
higher levels of prejudice than other students, increased
prejudice as a function of contact with them could be
the result of an attitude shift in the direction of their
higher levels of racism and ethnocentrism. To explore
the plausibility of this explanation, we simply calculated
average prejudice scores for the students across all five
waves—from pre-university to the end of the fourth
year. We then conducted a series of planned contrasts
using these prejudice scores and contrasted the Asian
American students against students from the other three
major ethnic groups (i.e., Whites, Latinos, and Blacks;
see Table 4). These comparisons were done with respect
to seven attitudinal measures of prejudice: (1) interethnic
unease, (2) interethnic competence, (3) symbolic
racism, (4) social dominance orientation, (5) anti-miscegenation
attitudes, (6) affect towards Latinos, and (7)
affect towards Blacks. Twenty of the 21 contrasts found
Asian American students to have significantly higher
prejudice scores than the other major groups. As shown
in Table 4, the size of these effects varied between small,
medium and large, with the largest differences between
Asian American and other students occurring between
Asian American and Latino students with regard to affect
towards Latinos and between Asian American and
Black students with regard to symbolic racism, social
dominance orientation and affect towards Black students
(Cohen, 1977). Therefore, it seems reasonable to
conclude that increasing prejudice as a function of
increasing exposure to Asian American roommates is
due to students accommodating to the values and
attitudes of their more prejudiced Asian American
roommates.
Table
5 comments
Comments feed for this article
July 8, 2009 at 6:23 pm
Julia
hmmm… I don’t quite know what to make of this. It definitely seems like some additional interpretation is in order… To identify one category of people as definitely more prejudiced seems extremely problematic…
What struck me first, though, were questions about how race is defined in this study and how students were placed in the various racial categories (self-identification?). In particular, I’m not sure what “Asian American” means in this category…born in the US to two parents who immigrated from Asia? born in Asia, then immigrated to US? If this study is really getting at cultural beliefs, it seems important to know about the family’s immigration history. And then what about Asian Americans who were adopted from Asia by Caucasian families? What about biracial Asian Americans? I dunno… It just seems like a lot of different variables could get conflated…
Also, I’m curious, did the study also evaluate the “change in prejudice” in the students of color who made up the other half of the roommate pairings?
July 8, 2009 at 10:10 pm
Jay
The thing that stands out to me the most on a first read through is that there seems to be an underlying assumption that white students are blank slates who adapt based on the attitudes of their peers from other ethnic groups. This seems to harken back to the idea that the “white view” is the neutral view – and then all these other factors, like having an non-white roommate get thrown on top of that neutral viewpoint.
“Therefore, it seems reasonable to conclude that increasing prejudice as a function of
increasing exposure to Asian American roommates is due to students accommodating to the values and attitudes of their more prejudiced Asian American roommates.”
So then why don’t Asian Americans adapt to the less prejudiced behavior of their less prejudiced roommates? Seems like a contradiction there in applying peer socialization theory.
July 9, 2009 at 4:12 pm
EZ
In addition to the points brought up in comment 1 this part is striking to me:
“(1) interethnic
unease, (2) interethnic competence, (3) symbolic
racism, (4) social dominance orientation, (5) anti-miscegenation
attitudes, (6) affect towards Latinos, and (7)
affect towards Blacks. ”
They queried the Asian-Am students about affect toward Blacks and Latinos and yet didn’t query the Black and Latino students about affect towards Asian-Americans, and no questions were asked of any ethnicity on affect towards whites. This seems like a flawed methodology.
July 14, 2009 at 6:52 am
Greg Andrew
“So then why don’t Asian Americans adapt to the less prejudiced behavior of their less prejudiced roommates? ”
The study doesn’t say that they do. The study finds that “the two groups that showed some negative effects on ethnic attitudes, Asian American and White residents, both showed very positive effects of being randomly assigned to black or Hispanic roommates.”
“yet didn’t query the Black and Latino students about affect towards Asian-Americans”
Yes it did
“no questions were asked of any ethnicity on affect towards whites”
Yes there were.
I realize that this is a long, technical study, but it’s kind of pointless to declare that the study doesn’t take certain things into account when you haven’t read it to see if it does.
July 15, 2009 at 3:54 pm
I’m not racist! One of my best friends is black!* « PostBourgie
[...] GPA’s. But the one that has been generating the most buzz at sites like angry asian man and Resist Racism is this study from UCLA cited in the article as follows: Several studies have shown that living [...]