Ella Price
In Kerry Kawakami’s paper “Mispredicting Affective and Behavioural Response to Racism” the paradox of remarking upon how strongly overt prejudice is condemned within modern society and the acts of why blatant racism still frequency occurs were scientifically examined (Kawakami, K., Dunn, E., Karmali, F., & Dovidio, F, D., 2009). The results of this study were truly astonishing, yet frightening as the differences between predicted responses and actual responses to racist behaviour was investigated. Given either two settings of a private or public environment, groups of non- black participants were used to basically illustrate the average racism theory, which states that individuals today who embrace egalitarian beliefs may continue to harbour nonconscious negative feelings towards outgroups, in this case, blacks (Kawakami et al., 2009). Groups were given a scenario to predict or literally physically show how they would feel and behave and how they actually feel and behave upon hearing a racist comment. Participants in the role of the forecaster had time to recognize the social demands dictated by widespread egalitarian norm, and therefore responded in ways they believed were socially acceptable rather than according to their true inclinations (Kawakami et al., 2009). On the contrary, actual responses were perceived to be based on spontaneous more unconscious attitudes. As a result, Kawakami concluded that despite current egalitarian cultural norms, one reason why reason and discrimination remain so prevalent in society may be that when people are literally within a scenario of overt racist acts, they do not respond in the way they anticipated in terms of egalitarian norms, which promotes prejudice and racism to continue (Kawakami et al., 2009). This study was very interesting and reflective of bizarre yet sickening modern social drawbacks. This