TALLAHASSEE, FLA. — After decades of exposure to all of those stereotypes -- the Aunt Jemimas and the gangsta rappers, the Willie Hortons and TV drug dealers -- this just wasn't supposed to be happening.
The test results baffled Florida State University psychologist Ashby Plant. She checked and rechecked the figures. Something must be wrong, she told herself.
Plant and her colleagues had just administered a racial Implicit Association Test to 74 white college students. A common tool in psychology lab work, the IAT purports to measure the kinds of biases people may not admit or even know they harbor. It is one of the more troubling, and fascinating, realities in Plant's line of work that when the test is administered to whites, about 75% typically show some degree of anti-black bias.
But in this case, her subjects were displaying almost no bias against African Americans. In fact, about 45% appeared to be favoring blacks over whites.
"It made us stop dead in our tracks," she said. "I mean, this was unheard of."
It was spring 2008 -- a moment of mounting intensity in America's presidential race. It was also the moment when Plant, 40, found herself delving into a new sub-specialty with few precedents in the social sciences.
Call it Obama Studies.
It is a line of inquiry pursued by a small group of researchers, most of them experts in the nature of bias and prejudice. Their goal is to bring some scientific rigor to vexing questions that continue to ricochet around American dining rooms, the kind that were only amplified this summer with the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., who is black: How are racial attitudes changing, if at all, in the age of the first black president?
Plant and her colleagues began speculating that their surprising numbers had something to do with the candidate Barack Obama. After all, his image was everywhere. Perhaps, they would later write in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, the students had been profoundly affected by repeated exposure to a man "whose qualities -- well-educated, motivated, articulate -- contradict the negative stereotypes of African Americans."
So they began designing an experiment to test their hypothesis.
Serious scientific inquiry into the nature of prejudice has largely been the domain of social psychologists, who study the way people interact with, think about and influence one another.
