The Nonverbal Transmission of Intergroup Bias: A Model of Bias Contagion with Implications for Social Policy.

In June of 1998 James Byrd Jr., a black man, was beaten, chained to the back of a pick-up truck, and dragged for miles—his body literally torn to pieces (Cropper, 1998). In October of that same year, Matthew Shepard, an openly gay university student was beaten, tortured, and tied to a wooden fence, left to freeze to death (Brooke, 1998). And as recently as April 2010, three men used a hot wire hanger to brand a swastika into the arm of a disabled Navajo man (U.S. Attorney’s Office, 2010). Hate crimes are disturbing and vivid examples of explicit discrimination. They violate the principles that have, for the last half-century, motivated a deluge of laws, educational programs, public service announcements, and other interventions aimed at eliminating discrimination. These interventions have largely been successful in reducing blatant one-on-one discrimination, including hate crimes. Yet accumulated patterns of inequality seem to contradict the relative paucity of blatant one-on-one discrimination. In North America, for example, toxic waste sites are unequally distributed near neighborhoods populated by racial minorities, the racial wealth-gap has quadrupled in three decades, and medically-necessary cardiac medications are less likely to be prescribed to racial minorities (Bullard, Mohai, Saha, & Wright, 2007; Shapiro, Meschede, & Sullivan, 2010; Smedley, Stith, & Nelson, 2003). Central and South American indigenous men earn as little as 1/3 of non-indigenous (White) men, Australian Aboriginal infants are twice as likely to be born pre-term compared to other Australian infants, and, on average, European citizens opine that their countries are worse off because of immigrants (de Ferranti, Perry, Ferreira, & Walton, 2004; Langridge, Nassar, Li, & Stanley, 2010; Zick, Pettigrew, & Wagner, 2008). In general, inequalities in income, access to housing, and health may be growing rather than receding (e.g., National Research Council, 2004; Pager & Shepard, 2008). There is thus a contradiction between blatant one-on-one discrimination and harmful accumulated patterns of discrimination: the former has been greatly reduced while the latter is holding strong. Contemporary theories of prejudice and discrimination address this contradiction by postulating that the explicit endorsement of egalitarianism is often betrayed by more subtly negative responses to people from other social groups (Dovidio, Kawakami, Johnson, Johnson, & Howard, 1997; Fazio, Jackson, Dunton, & Williams, 1995). These subtle responses are thought to drive equally subtle patterns of discrimination that only become obvious when accumulated (e.g., Crosby, 1982), as with the noted racial discrepancies in wealth, pre-term births, and proximity to toxic waste. In this article, we argue for modern interventions that target the transmission of these subtle biases. The interventions we propose are based on a new model detailing the transmission of bias. We argue that subtle intergroup bias is unintentionally transmitted and maintained through nonverbal behavior in a process that we describe as “bias contagion”. We introduce a two-stage model of bias contagion that can be used to inform interventions for reducing bias contagion and perhaps intergroup bias more generally (see Figure 1). Figure 1 The bias contagion model. The left side of the figure illustrates Stage 1 of the model, the expression of nonverbal bias. Nonverbal bias can either occur as a veridical index of the expresser’s intergroup bias (direct causation) or because of ... After reviewing the successes and failures of existing anti-discrimination efforts, we present the first stage of our bias contagion model. The first stage includes two means by which nonverbal behavior becomes biased. Nonverbal bias can occur because negative outgroup attitudes are “leaked” through nonverbal behavior (direct causation) or because worries about appearing biased ironically cause nonverbal bias (indirect causation). The second stage of the model describes how exposure to nonverbal bias causes observers to adopt biased attitudes. Implicit learning, normative influence, and informational influence together characterize this second stage. Next, we propose interventions relevant to each stage of the model. Ultimately, we conclude that biases ranging from racism to homophobia can be greatly reduced through educational and training interventions targeting bias contagion.