Changing Racial Prejudice Through Diversity Education

Journal of College Student Development, Mar/Apr 2005 by Hogan, David E, Mallott, Michael

Past research on the Modern Racism Scale has linked prejudice scores with a personality construct known as need for cognition (Waller, 1993). The need for cognition construct refers to a relatively stable curiosity disposition of individuals to engage in and enjoy effortful thinking about solutions to problems in academic, intrapersonal, and interpersonal domains (Cacioppo & Petty, 1982; Petty & Cacioppo, 1996). The theoretical link between racism and need for cognition is the normal cognitive process of stereotyping people to understand individuals belonging to a racial group different from the perceiver's. Stereotyping has long been recognized as a cornerstone of prejudiced thought, but it has been viewed only recently as a central cognitive process of individuals who score low on the Need for Cognition Scale (Allport, 1954; Cacioppo, Petty, Feinstein, & Jarvis, 1996; Kawakami, Dovidio, Moll, Hermsen, & Russin, 2000; Waller, 1993). Because changing prejudicial behavior requires relatively effortful cognitive processes, such as consciously resisting the use of racial stereotypes, acquiring and accepting information about minority groups that contradicts their own belief system, and being open to value systems of minorities (Dasgupta & Greenwald, 2001; Montheith, Devine, & Zuwerink, 1993), one can predict that individuals who score high on the Need for Cognition Scale would, in general, have lower prejudice scores than those who score low on the cognition scale. Waller reported a significant inverse correlation between need for cognition and modern racism in college students, but his study did not examine how need for cognition relates to changes in racism produced by diversity courses. The present research questions whether the beneficial effects of completing a race and gender course depend on the need for cognition variable. In summary, the design of the study was an Instruction (3) × Need for Cognition (2) × Pretest (2) factorial using a sample of commuter undergraduate students.

METHOD

Participants

Three hundred seventeen students from a university serving the metropolitan area of Cincinnati, Ohio were recruited for participation but 67 participants were dropped from the study either because they withdrew from the course, did not complete the forms, were enrolled in more than one of the sampled classes, or did not meet the criterion of being non-African American. (For a comparison of African Americans, Caucasians, Asians, Hispanics, and other groups on the Modern Racism Scale see Chang, 2001). A total of 250 forms were used in the posttest analyses. The mean age of the participants was 21.7 years. The sample consisted of 238 Caucasians (95.2%), 9 Asian-Americans (3.6%), and 3 "other/unspecified" ethnicity (1.2%). There were 190 (76%) females and 60 (24%) males. The race and gender demographics of the sample were representative of the full-time undergraduate student population enrolled at this institution during the semester of assessment (spring 2002). The study was approved by the Institutional Review Board for the Protection of Human Subjects.