Benefit claimants: stereotypes and implicit attitudes My name is Robert de Vries. I'm a Lecturer in Quantitative Sociology, here at Kent and today I want to talk to you about implicit attitudes. Now implicit attitudes are the unconscious feelings and stereotypes we have about various different groups in society. So, to try and explain this I'm going to start with a riddle. So a man and his son are out driving and unfortunately they get into quite a bad car accident and the father gets the worst of it and he's killed immediately at the scene. But the son survives and he's rushed immediately to a hospital and straight into surgery and the surgeon looks down and says: 'I'm sorry, I can't operate on this boy Ð he's my son.' How is this possible? Well, some of you might be thinking: I've heard this riddle before. Some of you might be thinking, well, that's not a riddle at all Ðobviously, the surgeon is the boy's mother. But I imagine that quite a lot of you had at least a brief moment of confusion and, where this has been studied elsewhere, a lot of people, both male and female, really struggle to come up with an answer to this riddle at all Ð and this is because of the strong implicit idea we have of surgeons as men. So, if someone asked us straight out: 'Can women be surgeons?' obviously we would say 'Yes, of course they can.' But over time we've developed this unconscious association between the job of surgeon and the male gender and we have these kind of unconscious stereotypes about a lot of different groups in society and they come about through the sort of slow drip drip drip of experience over time Ð so through exposure to the media or through everyday conversation. So, for example, if you grew up watching films and TV shows where women were morlikely to be portrayed as emotional and irrational, where men were cold and logical, and you've had those stereotypes reinforced over time, for example through other types of media Ð the newspapers or online or everyday conversation Ð then in the associational network of your mind these concepts become more and more closely bound together, even if you don't necessarily want them to. And similarly, if you're consistently exposed to the idea or the stereotype of black men as aggressive or thuggish, then, again, even if you don't want it to, those concepts will become more tightly associated in your mind. And again you might not necessarily agree with these stereotypes, you might genuinely feel like you've believed that people of different races, different genders are fundamentally equal, but under the surface these unconscious attitudes are present. They have developed over time. So for example, if you're at work and you need help with a technical problem and you can't be bothered to schlep all the way down to the IT basement, you want to go and look for a colleague to help you. It might be only later on when someone asks you who you went to first, that you realise that you assumed that a man would be better able to help you. Now bearing that in mind Ð bearing in mind how these attitudes develop through, for example, exposure to the media Ð I want you to take a look at these slides. So here is an example of how welfare benefit claimants are portrayed in the UK media. So you can see here: 'Help us stop 1.5 billion benefit scroungers.' These headlines are all from The Sun. 'Today The Sun is declaring war on feckless benefits claimants, to slash the five billion wasted in Britain's shambolic handouts culture. And here, you might not be able to see the text, but this is The Welfies Ð the award for spotting Britain's dossers and scroungers. And while you're looking at these I want you to remember that The Sun is the UK's most popular newspaper by far, followed by the Daily Mail. So what I think you can see from this, is that welfare benefit claimants in the UK are discussed in strongly negative and stereotyped terms and standard studies of implicit attitudes have tended to focus on more traditional stereotype groups so, for example, based on ethnicity or gender. But I think you can see from here that it's plausible that exposure to these types of stereotypes might also lead people to have the similar kind of implicit attitudes towards welfare benefit claimants. And this isn't necessarily just an abstract academic idea. These attitudes can have real-world important implications. So one of the most important is that it can affect how we interact with and how we behave towards members of those stereotyped groups. So, many studies have shown that people's negative unconscious responses and unconscious stereotypes about a particular social group affects how they treat members of those groups. So for example, studies in the US have shown that negative racial stereotypes and racial unconscious feelings can affect how doctors treat black patients, how the police and justice systems treat black suspects, and a similar kind of process might be going on with welfare benefit claimants in the UK. So people's unconscious negative responses to this group, built up through exposure to the media, might be affecting how they behave towards benefit claimants themselves and personally Ð on a personal level... and this is at a time when welfare benefit claimants and disabled people are reporting increasing levels of stigma in society. And it might also affect how welfare claimants are treated by important institutions that they have to interact with on a regular basis, like the Job Centre. So in a similar way to the way that negative racial attitudes affects how black people interact with institutions like the justice system. One of the other ways in which implicit use might affect how welfare benefit claimants fare in society is that it might affect how people support different kinds of social policies. So in the States again with other groups they've shown that, for example, people's negative unconscious responses to Latino immigrants affects how they support liberal or conservative immigration policies. And this is independent of their conscious explicit attitudes, so what this means is that even if you just look at people who have positive conscious feelings, who say that they have no problem with Latino immigrants, their unconscious negative responses might still be having an effect on whether or not they support the kind of policies that will keep immigrants out. And on the flip side of that, studies have shown that positive implicit associations with African Americans Ð so if people feel, unconsciously, a positive bias towards African Americans Ð that affects how they and whether they support pro-black policies like affirmative action. And this might be part of the reason why in the UK we see such a low level of support for the welfare system. It might be that people's unconscious negative responses, their unconscious image of what a welfare benefit claimant is like, is influencing their support for whether they think we should be spending money on this group of people. I should say here that I'm not trying to draw an equivalence between racism in the US and the UK or sexism and prejudice towards welfare benefit claimants. What I'm trying to highlight here is that the process from exposure to stereotypes through, for example, the media to these the generation, the development of these negative implicit attitudes Ð the process might be similar and therefore the outcomes might have some similarity to each other. So my own research in this area is at quite an early stage but a small initial study that I carried out in Oxford did find that, when it comes to welfare benefit claimants, people do seem to have these unconscious negative responses. And it might not be surprising to to hear that people with the strongest negative conscious attitude, so people who reported having the biggest problem, having the most negative attitudes towards claimants, were also the people who had the strongest negative unconscious responses. But even if you just look at people who have positive attitudes towards welfare claimants, or don't have any particular negative attitudes, they don't report them, then they still show some evidence of negative unconscious bias. And this negative unconscious bias is associated with people's support for different kinds of welfare policies. So, for example, people with more negative unconscious responses are more likely to support stricter welfare policies Ð so, for example, policies which will reduce the amount of money we spend on welfare benefits. So I want to emphasise that this is a small initial study, so we can't necessarily generalise the results here to the UK population as a whole but I do think it shows that this is an area that's worth exploring. So beyond just finding out whether these results do generalise which is obviously very important, I think there are a few important questions that really need answers and the first one is that we need to find out what characteristics exactly do people associate unconsciously with welfare benefit claimants. What is their what is their default image of a benefit claimant Ð what a benefit claimant looks like, what a benefit claimant is like as a person, what characteristics do they associate with that group? And also, what is the importance of those characteristics for their support for welfare policy? So which characteristics that they do associated with this group are important for whether they perceive this group to be deserving of the money that we spend on them. And the second question I think which is particularly important, is what the role of the media is in this. I think you saw from these slides that Ð and some of them you can see are still here Ð that currently the UK media do discuss welfare benefit claimants in strongly negative terms. But if they all change their tune tomorrow, if they all decided to start covering welfare benefit claimants as if they were people who had just fallen on hard times through no fault of their own, or in just a generally more sympathetic light, as opposed to focusing on them as being grasping, selfish scroungers, then would this have an effect on people's unconscious attitudes? Would that actually change people's feelings? This I think is an open question; it's an important one and it's part of this idea of whether and how we can change or combat these negative unconscious perceptions. Now for some people, their negative unconscious feelings might be perfectly aligned with their conscious feelings. They might feel pretty negatively about benefit claimants but be perfectly happy about that fact. But that's not necessarily true for everyone. So for some people their negative unconscious feelings towards this group, in the same way that their negative unconscious feelings towards different races or genders, might be uncomfortable for them. They might not want to feel this way. There might be, it might be, in conflict with their values or with their politics. And therefore we want to kind of figure out how we might go about combating these attitudes and one of the things I think I should do here is combat a common misconception of what implicit attitudes are, unconscious attitudes are, and that's that they're somehow more real than our conscious attitudes. And that's not necessarily true. The people who in my study reported that they had no negative attitudes towards welfare benefit claimants but still nevertheless showed some level of unconscious negative bias, they weren't necessarily lying. They weren't necessarily secretly prejudiced Ð just in the same way that, if you were confused by the riddle at the beginning of this lecture, then doesn't mean that you're secretly a sexist. All it means is that we are all immersed in the same cultural manure: we're all exposed to the same stereotypes leading to the development of the same kind of unconscious attitudes, the same kind of unconscious associations, and perhaps that means that the best way of addressing these unconscious attitudes is to first recognise that they exist. So research into other social groups, so principally on gender attitudes, has shown that clinging on to this idea that we are perfectly objective and fair and think of everyone the same is perversely the easiest way of letting our unconscious attitudes into the driver's seat. So if there's a takeaway message from this lecture it's that, in order to prevent our unconscious biases from affecting us in ways that we don't want, we have to first recognise that they exist and in that way we can be vigilant against them affecting our decisions and our behaviour. Thanks very much for listening.