September 20 : A new study conducted at Princeton University warns that subtle, ambiguous racist messages of today effect an individual’s mental capacity more adversely than overt hostility of yesteryear.

Psychologists at the university say that all human beings are driven by a few core needs, which includes the need to understand the world around them. When a person does a thing to another, they say, the victim wants to know the reason for that.

However, the problem occurs when the victim has limited cognitive resources, due to which he finds it very difficult to understand why he was victimised, say the researchers.

According to them, old-fashioned racism such as a “No Negroes Allowed” sign is hateful and hurtful but not vague or confusing, and it does not require much cognitive work to understand it.

But a person who fails to get a job despite knowing that he is the most qualified candidate for it applies more mental energy to know why he has not been chosen, the researchers add.

Princeton psychologists Jessica Salvatore and J. Nicole Shelton ran an experiment in which volunteers witnessed a company’s hiring decisions from the inside. They saw the competing resumes of the candidates and the interviewer’s comments and recommendations.

Neither the company was real nor were there any real people involved, though the volunteers believed everything to be real.

The experiment left no doubt about which candidate was best qualified, and sometimes that candidate was chosen, sometimes not. Sometimes the company passed over the best candidate for blatantly racist reasons, with the reviewer commenting that the candidate belonged to “too many minority organizations”.

Sometimes the best candidate was simply passed over for no good reason.

The experiment were run many times so that both black and white volunteers saw black candidates reviewed by whites and by blacks and the same for white candidates.

After witnessing these fair and unfair hiring decisions, the study volunteers took the so-called Stroop test, during which the names of colours flash on the screen for an instant, but in the “wrong” colours (the word “red” in green letters, for example). The aim was to quickly identify the colour of the letters.

The Stroop test helped researchers to determine whether experiencing subtle racism interfered with that mental capacity.

It was found that black volunteers who had witnessed unfair but ambiguous hiring decisions did much less well on the Stroop test, suggesting that they were using all their mental resources to make sense of the unfairness.

White volunteers, on the other hand, were more impaired by overt racism than by the more ambiguous discrimination.

Salvatore and Shelton believe it might have happened because whites rarely experience any racism.

The study has been published in the journal Psychological Science. (ANI)