Conservatism and Fairness in Contemporary Politics:

Unpacking the Psychological Underpinnings of Modern

Racism∗
Riley K. Carney†
Ryan D. Enos‡

Abstract
The study of intergroup attitudes is a central topic across the social sciences. While
there is little doubt about the importance of intergroup attitudes in shaping behavior,
both the psychological underpinnings of these attitudes and the tools used to measure
them remain contentious. Modern racism scales, which are the most common way
to measure anti-Black prejudice in political science, were created in response to a
shift in the attitudes of white Americans toward African Americans, and reflect a mix
of social conservatism and anti-Black affect. Using experiments, we offer evidence
that modern racism scales measure attitudes toward any group, rather than African
Americans alone. In the spirit of the original motivation behind modern racism scales,
which were created to capture changing public opinion about race, we suggest this
property of modern racism may reflect a change in how stereotypes about low work-
ethic are applied across groups and that the target of resentment for white Americans,
especially for political conservatives, has broadened beyond African Americans. Our
results suggest that modern racism scales reflect a general set of attitudes about fairness
and that new instruments may be needed to measure group-specific prejudice.

∗
We thank R. Brian Law for suggesting this line of research. We also thank Jack Citrin, Stanley Feldman,
Bernard Fraga, Paul Sniderman, Michael Tesler, and Nicholas Valentino for useful conversations. We thank
participants at the Harvard Social Policy and Inequality Seminar and the Harvad Social Psychology Brown
Bag Lunch for feedback. And we thanks Time-Sharing Experiments in Social Science for funding some of
the data collection. A version of this paper was presented at the 2015 Midwest Political Science Annual
Meeting and the 2017 NYU CESS Experiments Conference.
†
Department of Government, Harvard University; [email protected]
‡
Department of Government, Harvard University; [email protected]

1
 Measuring intergroup attitudes is centrally important to social science. A tremendous
amount of scholarship is devoted to understanding the content and source of these attitudes
and their influence on behavior. In the study of American politics, white attitudes toward
African Americans may be especially relevant, and a great deal of influential scholarship has
focused on refining the techniques used to measure anti-Black prejudice. Perhaps no theory
in this area has been more successful than “modern racism” (Sears and Kinder, 1971; Kinder
and Sears, 1981).
Theories of modern racism, also known as symbolic racism or racial resentment, were
first postulated more than forty years ago in response to a shift in the expression of racial
prejudice. As more explicit forms of prejudice began to fade, scholars identified a new
set of racial attitudes, rooted in both anti-Black animus and the belief that Blacks violate
traditional social values. In contrast to more traditional accounts of racism, in which overt
prejudice is measured by support for racial stereotypes about Black inferiority, the new
scales were devised to capture both the racial affect and social value judgments included in
symbolic racial attitudes (Henry and Sears, 2002).
The use of these scales is widespread in social science. In fact, modern racism is by far
the most common instrument used to measure racism in political science research. Given
the extensive use of modern racism scales, understanding the attitudes underlying racial
resentment is critically important to both the study of modern racism itself and the study
of racial prejudice more broadly. We are argue that because modern racism scales are
specifically designed to measure a social value dimension, they may reflect a more diffuse set
of attitudes that can be applied to groups other than African Americans. This property of
modern racism may be especially relevant as the United States continues to diversify and the
political landscape evolves to accommodate a wider range of groups. From this perspective,
if modern racism does not exclusively target African Americans, but rather reflects a broader
ideology about fairness and work ethic, future research that makes use of these scales may

1
be measuring attitudes distinct from those observed in the past, and the tremendous body
of scholarship using these scales may need to be reinterpreted.
To investigate the attitudes underlying modern racism scales, we offer a novel test: we
deploy surveys using the exact questions that constitute standard modern racism scales, but
we substitute Blacks for other target groups that are not commonly associated with known
stereotypes or overt prejudice in the United States. For example, we substitute Blacks for
Lithuanians and then measure the difference between mean resentment toward Lithuanians
and Blacks. Across multiple groups and multiple samples on different survey platforms, we
find a strong and consistent pattern: the results obtained using groups other than Blacks
are substantively indistinguishable from those measured when Blacks are the target group.
Decomposing this measure further, we find that political conservatives express only minor
differences in resentment across target groups. Far greater differences in resentment toward
Blacks and other groups can be found among racially sympathetic liberals. In short, we find
that modern racism questions appear to measure attitudes toward any group, rather than
African Americans alone. We suggest that modern racism scales are primarily capturing
two phenomenon: 1) racial liberalism or sympathy and 2) a general set of attitudes about
fairness, or a political orientation known as “just world belief” that perceives the world as
consisting of people who work hard and those who do not.
Despite their widespread use, there are well-known and largely unresolved (Hochschild,
2000) controversies about modern racism. Some scholars have argued that modern racism
scales represent a set of social values associated with political and social conservatism, or
“principled conservatism,” and thereby measure ideology more strongly than they do racial
prejudice (Sniderman and Tetlock, 1986; Feldman and Huddy, 2005). Our findings allow us
to refocus this debate, which has been largely unanswerable with existing approaches. We
ask not whether modern racism is confounded with principled conservatism, but instead offer
evidence to suggest that modern racism reflects a broad resentment that can be applied across

2
a range of groups, and that a common belief system underpins both modern conservatism
and modern racism. We propose that high levels of modern racism are consistent with just
world belief (Lerner, 1980), a belief-system that motivates conservatism (Jost et al., 2003)
and shapes attitudes about fairness. On one hand, this indicates that critics of modern
racism scales are correct: the scales do not capture attitudes specific to African Americans.
However, the scales do capture a form of racism, both a general resentment that applies
to many groups and a specific failure to recognize the unique historical plight of African
Americans.

Foundations of Modern Racism

The measurement of intergroup attitudes is hindered, in large part, by the uncertain

nature of prejudice and the factors that determine it. In addition to theoretical and method-
ological challenges, much of this difficulty stems from changes over time in how racial preju-
dice is expressed. Prior to World War II, anti-Black prejudice was overt, primarily rooted in
the belief that African Americans were biologically inferior to whites and a desire for social
distance between races. However, as the Civil Rights Movement unfolded, this “old-fashioned
racism” grew less common, and white Americans were markedly less likely to provide bio-
logical justifications for prejudicial beliefs (Schuman et al., 1997). Racial attitudes began to
take more subtle form, and despite rising white support for egalitarian principles and racial
equality in abstract, anti-Black discrimination remained strong (Sears and Henry, 2003).
To explain this shift in racial attitudes, scholars proposed new theories of racial prejudice,
chiefly modern racism, which is derived from the belief in cultural, rather than biological,
differences between Blacks and whites.
Unlike old-fashioned racism, modern racism is a “blend” of anti-Black affect and tradi-
tional values, such as individualism, self-reliance, and Protestant work ethic (Kinder and

3
Sears, 1981; Sears and Kinder, 1971). Specifically, modern racism reflects four primary be-
liefs about African Americans: (1) the unwillingness of Blacks to work hard has prevented
their own advancement (2) Blacks demand too much (3) Blacks no longer face discrimination
as they once did, and (4) Blacks have received more than they deserve (Henry and Sears,
2002).
A number of studies using modern racism scales to assess prejudicial attitudes have
shown symbolic racism to be strongly predictive of preferences for race-oriented policies, in
many cases overriding political ideology, party identification, and traditional racial attitudes
(Tesler and Sears, 2010; Kinder and Sanders, 1996; Sears and Henry, 2005). In addition to
having robust predictive power, modern racism appears to be both internally consistent and
stable over time (Henry and Sears, 2009). Indeed, average racial resentment in the United
States has been strikingly stable since 1986 (Tesler and Sears, 2010).
Due to the predictive strength and consistency of these instruments, modern racism scales
have been widely used in social science research to measure racial attitudes. We analyzed
four major political science journals, the American Political Science Review, the American
Journal of Political Science, the British Journal of Political Science, and the Journal of
Politics, and found that from 2004 through 2015, nearly 70 percent of articles that measured
attitudes toward Blacks used racial resentment scales to assess racial prejudice.
Racial resentment scales have become so commonplace that they are usually used to
measure racial attitudes without explicit justification. As Tesler (2012) notes, “symbolic
racism and racial resentment have become the focal constructs for explaining the role of racial
attitudes in contemporary American politics” (see also Hutchings and Valentino (2004)).
Moreover, measures of modern racism are not restricted to social science publications, but
are commonly used by scholars and journalists writing about racism in the popular press.
Despite their widespread use, our understanding of modern racism scales, and the role
of racial attitudes in American politics more generally, remains incomplete. Although most

4
of the debate surrounding modern racism took place more than twenty years ago, the use
of racial resentment scales persisted without resolving much of the disagreement around
the scales’ validity. Sniderman and Tetlock (1986), among others, argue that measures
of modern racism more strongly correspond to political conservatism than discriminatory
attitudes (Tetlock, 1994; Sniderman and Piazza, 1993; Kluegel and Bobo, 1993; Zigerell,
2015). Others argue that modern racism scales reflect opposition to government assistance
more broadly (Feldman and Huddy, 2005). Likewise, modern racism scales could capture
a broader set of beliefs, such as ethnocentrism, individualism, or antiegalitarianism, rather
than a specific anti-Black animus (Schuman et al., 1997; Carmines and Merriman, 1993;
Sidanius et al., 1999).
Proponents of the modern racism scales emphasize that modern racism predicts attitudes
toward racial attitudes more strongly than conservatism and other social values (Tarman
and Sears, 2005; Sears and Henry, 2005). Furthermore, informative studies by Tesler and
Sears (2010) and Tesler (2012) show that modern racism is correlated with attitudes about
Barack Obama and policies supported by Obama and is less strongly associated with other
Democratic presidential candidates or their policies.
Although the distinctive predictive power of modern racism measures suggests that these
scales capture a more robust set of attitudes than conservatism alone, the nature of those
attitudes remains unclear, especially when placed in context of past controversies and dra-
matic changes to the American political and racial landscape in the last 20 years alone.
Rather, modern racism scales may reflect a more diffuse set of attitudes about fairness that
can be applied irrespective of target group and, as we show, appear to be applied to nearly
any target group made available.
Furthermore, nearly all studies that test the properties of modern racism scales rely on
observational data and cannot effectively separate attitudes specific to modern racism scales
from potential confounding attitudes. We therefore designed tests to experimentally assess

5
the attitudes that constitute these scales. If whites express the same attitudes no matter the
group targeted in the question, or if differences in attitudes appear to be driven by racial
sympathy rather than racial animus, then these attitudes are likely not reflective of a specific
anti-Black animus, but rather a general resentment toward a broad range of target groups.
In short, while there is little doubt that modern racism is predictive of political behavior and
attitudes, an experimental investigation of the underlying properties is needed to understand
the content of contemporary racial attitudes in the United States.

Work Ethic, Just World Belief and Conservatism

Why might we expect to see modern racism attitudes applied similarly to groups that
are non-Black? To start, we note that the attribution of stereotypes about inadequate work-
ethics to low-status groups can be seen across time and place. Scholars such as Sidanius and
Pratto (2001) have even argued that the tendency to legitimize the position of low-status
groups is a nearly universal feature of human societies. Such stereotypes are not uniquely
targeted at Blacks, but instead reflect a general orientation toward low-status groups.
Manifestations of these claims in modern conservatism can be found, for example, in Mitt
Romney’s famous remark during the 2012 election that “47 percent [of Americans]. . . are
dependent upon government.” This comment was obviously intended to include low-status
groups beyond just African Americans. Signals such as those from Romney could, of course,
inform the political attitudes of conservative Americans so that they will endorse modern
racism questions, regardless of how they feel about Blacks in particular. This narrative of
fairness can also be seen in American politics more broadly. For example, recent research
by Cramer (2016) explores the rise of anti-elitism and resentment among rural communities,
who feel their urban counterparts are receiving undue benefits from the government. While
this antagonism toward cities is noticeably tinged in racial prejudice, Cramer also notes that

6
attitudes among rural whites are rooted in a more fundamental sense of fairness. Perceptions
and stereotypes around deservingnesss appear to be readily applied to racial minorities and
perceived out-groups. Moreover, recent prominent conservative politicians, most notably
Donald Trump, while not retreating from familiar stereotypes about African Americans,
have accused other groups, including Latino immigrants, of abusing government assistance.
To that end, because modern racial attitudes and attitudes about fairness seem to target a
variety of groups, we ask: what underlying belief system induces this relationship?
While debates about modern racism have largely stagnated over the last 30 years, political
psychology has made major advances in understanding the nature of belief systems. Much
of this scholarly work has focused on the roots of conservatism. In an influential article, Jost
et al. (2003) argued that political conservatism is a system of motivated cognition, adopted
to satisfy certain psychological needs. Summarizing a meta-analysis of variables that predict
conservatism, they state that “the core ideology of conservatism stresses resistance to change
and justification of inequality” (Jost et al., 2003, p. 339, emphasis added). This “system
justification” is an ideological motivation to defend existing social systems against instability,
threat, and attack. System justification draws on a related concept known as “just world
theory” (Lerner, 1980), in which people are motivated to believe that people “get what they
deserve.” From this perspective, poor individuals are impoverished due to a lack of work
ethic, rather than social or political barriers. The tendency to adopt this view has been found
to be higher in conservatives than in liberals (Jost, Burgess and Mosso, 2001; Bénabou and
Tirole, 2006).
Just world belief has obvious parallels to modern racism scales. When subjects endorse
statements such as “it’s really a matter of some people not trying hard enough; if blacks would
only try harder they could be just as well off as whites,” it may reflect an underlying ideology
that informs both conservative belief systems and modern racism. Political conservatives
with high just world belief should be motivated to endorse statements that people could be

7
better off if they just tried harder, regardless of the target group in question, simply because
this social value is part of their core motiviated belief system. As such, modern racism scales
will not measure attitudes specific to Blacks per se.
We also note that just world belief is consistent with the theoretical underpinnings of
the modern racism scales. As biological justifications of racism were abandoned, new justi-
fications were constructed to explain the inability of Blacks to achieve socioeconomic parity
with whites. Just world, and the related theory of system justification, similarly assert that
individuals are motivated to reduce cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957) by adopting the
belief that people of low social status deserve their status—hence, as biological explanations
for justifying the low social status of Blacks declined, a belief in a just world would motivate
people to search for alternative explanations for Black social status, such as a lack of hard
work. However, as we noted above, such a belief could be applied to any low status group
and is not unique to Blacks, nor to racial groups more generally. To that end, as populist
political rhetoric in the United States has simultaneously expanded the range of groups tar-
geted by negative stereotypes and emphasized fairness, conservatives may readily apply the
beliefs contained in the racial resentment scales to an expanding range of groups.
Although most research that uses modern racism scales take high scores to measure a
negative attitude toward African Americans, often termed “racial resentment,” Kinder and
Sanders (1996) suggest that that the scales also measure “racial sympathy” and “distin-
guish between those whites who are generally sympathetic toward blacks and those who
are generally unsympathetic” (106). Indeed, Tesler and Sears (2010) found evidence that
low racial-resentment voters consistently supported Obama over other Democrats. By this
perspective, modern racism scales capture both ends of the spectrum of racial attitudes: re-
sentment and sympathy (see also Tesler and Sears (2015); Tesler (2016)). However, because
conservatives’ responses may be driven by something other than specific attitudes about
Blacks, they may respond consistently, regardless of what group is in question. For liberals,

8
on the other hand, attitudes toward race and equality are deeply salient to liberal ideology,
and they may be sensitive to the particular historical plight of African Americans and less
likely to be motivated by just world belief. As such, it may be liberals, rather than conserva-
tives, for whom modern racism scales measure attitudes that are exclusive to Blacks. In that
case, modern racism scales would only capture racial sympathy and not racial resentment.

Design

The four-question modern racism scale (Kinder and Sanders, 1996) consists of the fol-
lowing questions:1

1. Over the past few years, blacks have gotten less than they deserve.

2. Irish, Italian, Jewish, and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their
way up. Blacks should do the same without any special favors.

3. It’s really a matter of some people not trying hard enough; if blacks would only try
harder they could be just as well off as whites.

4. Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult
for blacks to work their way out of the lower class.

We suspect that respondents may answers these questions in a consistent manner, regard-
less of whether the target is Blacks or another group. If conservatives, in particular, respond
consistently to these questions by endorsing conservative attitudes toward out-groups re-
gardless of the target, this indicates that a common belief system is behind responses to
these questions. For example, if white Americans will endorse the statement “It’s really
a matter of some people not trying hard enough; if Niueans would only try harder they
1
Our study was pre-registered with egap on December 30, 2014, ID: 20150202AA.

9
could be just as well off as whites” at the same levels they will when the statement is made
about Blacks, then responses to modern racism scale are likely driven by other psychological
features of political conservatives that lead them to endorse these statements across target
groups, rather than specific attitudes about Blacks.2
In our trials, subjects were asked two primary sets of questions. One set included ques-
tions used in the standard racial resentment scale with Blacks as the target group. The
second set of questions was identical to the first, but with a non-standard target group in
place of Blacks. The target group was randomly assigned from a diverse list of groups, such
as “Bhutanese” or “Nepalese,” that are unlikely to be associated with stereotypes or racial
animus like those expressed toward Blacks. We also included “Hispanic,” “some whites,”
and “Americans” to test whether just world belief is driving responses in a way that would
cause subjects to endorse statements about the importance of hard work, even if they have
well-formed attitudes about the groups in question. We tested a total of seventeen non-
Black target groups, with each subject answering questions about two groups: Blacks and
one non-standard target group.3 With this range of groups, we test can test 1) whether sub-
jects have systematically different responses across target groups; 2) the influence of racial
sympathy, by observing whether liberals express lower resentment toward Blacks than other
low-status groups, including Hispanics; 3) the role of low work ethic stereotypes, or just
world belief, by observing the relationship between a belief in a just world and intergroup
attitudes; both toward groups about which the subjects are likely to have weak or no beliefs,
such as Bhutanese, and toward groups about which subjects may have strong beliefs, such
as Blacks.
In the non-standard set of questions, we excluded the question about slavery since it is
2
Sniderman and Carmines (1997) offered a related test, replacing “Blacks” with “new immigrants from
Europe,” but use only a single item from the racial resentment scale (see also Neblo (2009)).
3
Subjects on two surveys were randomized into either seeing a white target group or one of several other
groups, including Black and non-Black groups. This was to ensure a robust sample of subjects who saw
white as the target group.

10
not relevant to other groups. In most of our trials, when asked about Blacks, we randomly
assigned subjects to receive either the three non-slavery questions or all four questions usually
included in the racial resentment scale. In the Appendix, we establish that our results are
unchanged using the three question modern racism scale and the four-question scale. As
such, we report pooled results for anti-Black resentment, using both three and four question
scales.
Response options to modern racism questions are a five-point Likert scale from “Strongly
Disagree” to “Strongly Agree.” Responses are scaled into a single score to measure resent-
ment. We refer to scaled scores for the Black target group and alternative target groups
questions as Black resentment and non-Black resentment, respectively, with higher means
indicating higher levels of resentment. We randomized which set of questions appeared
first to allow for both between-subject and within-subject tests. We suspect, however, that
within-subject tests may suffer from anchoring or social desirability effects, so while the
results we show below are even stronger using within-subject tests, we concentrate exclu-
sively on between-subject comparisons for formal statistical tests. Following Tesler and Sears
(2010), we test all subjects, regardless of their race, but similar results are obtained when
limited to white subjects.
Using 12 separate surveys, we recruited 5,966 subjects using Amazon Mechanical Turk
and the Harvard Digital Lab for the Social Sciences (DLABSS)4 and an additional nation-
ally representative sample of 733 subjects through Time-sharing Experiments in the Social
Sciences (TESS) for 6,699 total subjects.5 We used different groups across trials as we itera-
tively tested the robustness of our findings. In the Appendix summarizes our trials. We see
no systematic differences across survey platforms, so, in most analyses, we combine all our
4
DLABSS is a volunteer, web-based, survey panel. Similar to Mechanical Turk (Berinsky, Huber and
Lenz, 2012), it has been shown to have desirable survey qualities and using the platform researchers have
replicated a range of studies (Enos, Hill and Strange, 2017).
5
TESS recruits subjects through GfK Knowledge Networks. Subjects in this sample were randomly
assigned to one of three target groups: Black, Surinamese, or Mauritanian.

11
surveys into a single dataset. In the Appendix, we also present summary statistics for the
demographic characteristics of our subjects.
In some surveys, in addition to self-reported ideology, we also asked respondents about
their positions on policies that do not contain a racialized component in order to measure
ideological orientation. Some subjects were also asked their views on the death penalty
and affirmative action in the hiring of Black employees, which are frequently used in modern
racism research to measure how well modern racism scales predict implicit and explicit racial
attitudes, respectively. In keeping with recent research on modern racism scales, in some
trials we also included questions about Obama, specifically 2012 presidential vote choice,
overall approval of Obama and his policies, and support for Obamacare. In some trials,
we also administered a Just World Belief Scale (Lipkus, 1991). We also asked a general
knowledge question about where in the world the non-Black target group originates. For
example, if subjects were asked about “Bhutanese,” they were asked on which continent
Bhutan is located.
We also tested two different versions of the modern racism questions: one using the
original wording and one with “in the United States” added to each question to test if
responses changed when groups are placed in context of the United States. This allowed us
to be sure that subjects were thinking of Blacks and other target groups as being in the same
context. In analysis reported in the Appendix, we find no meaningful difference in results
between these question wordings.
Our primary test is straight-forward: if modern racism is measuring attitudes specific to
Blacks, then average levels of resentment should be different when Blacks are included as the
target group. In case responses to the modern racism scales vary by ideology, as the theories
discussed above may predict, we also subset our data by ideology.

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Results

What is the difference in resentment when asked about a Black versus non-Black target
group? Pooling all target groups, we see little to no difference between Black and non-
Black resentment. In Figure 1, we display average racial resentment toward different target
groups, revealing a striking similarity in average racial resentment. The figure shows the
distribution and median resentment for responses when the target group is Black, white,
or all other groups collapsed into a single variable.6 The distribution of resentment toward
Black and non-Black target groups is very similar, except that the spread of responses for
Blacks, especially the bottom quartile, is larger than all other groups, indicating that a
higher portion of respondents express low levels of resentment toward Blacks than toward
other groups. We also see that the median response for the white target group is higher
than for the Black target group. As we will see below, these differences are largely driven by
liberal respondents. In Figure 2, we show the same figure for each group individually. The
only target group to have a meaningfully different median is American.
In Table 1, we compare responses for non-Black target groups against responses for the
Black target group using a between-subjects T-test for difference of means, with the standard
errors clustered by survey. We group together the responses to all non-Black target groups,
other than white. For each group, we report the mean resentment score, standard deviation,
the difference of means from Black resentment, the p-value of the T-test, and the N.
Among all respondents, the mean resentment toward non-Black target groups and the
Black-target group is clearly different (p < .01 for both whites and other groups), but in the
opposite direction of what might be expected if these questions were capturing specific animus
toward Blacks. Resentment is clearly higher against all other groups.7
6
With all non-Black target groups treated as a single variable, α = 0.73. This is, perhaps, strikingly
high—despite the disparate nature of these groups, α still reaches conventional levels of acceptable reliability.
This, too, is evidence that answers to these questions may be driven by a broader set of attitudes that are
independent of the target group.
7
It is also possible that the similarity between levels of resentment toward Black and non-Black target

13
 Figure 1: Racial Resentment using Black, white, and All Other Groups as the Target

5.0 ●

●
4.5

4.0

3.5
Resentment

3.0

2.5

2.0

1.5
●

1.0 ● ●

Black White Others

Distribution of Racial Resentment for all subjects using using Black, white, and all other groups as the
target.

Table 1: Tests of Differences of Means in Racial Resentment

All Conservatives Liberals
Mean SD Diff p N Mean SD Diff p N Mean SD Diff p N
Black 2.82 1.05 2643 3.50 0.87 617 2.45 1.01 1397
White 3.16 0.77 -0.33 0.00 1189 3.52 0.63 -0.03 0.61 233 3.01 0.79 -0.56 0.00 680
Other 2.98 0.76 -0.16 0.00 3233 3.39 0.69 0.11 0.14 743 2.73 0.74 -0.28 0.00 1681

Mean results for all subjects, self-identified conservatives, and self-identified liberals. For each group, we
display the mean, standard deviation, difference in means from Black, the p-value associated with a T-test
for difference in means from Blacks, and the N. Standard errors are clustered by survey.

14
 Figure 2: Racial Resentment using Black and Other Groups as the Target

5.0 ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

● ● ●
4.5

4.0
Resentment

3.5

3.0

2.5

2.0
●
1.5
● ● ●

1.0 ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
Black
Albanian
Angolan
Hispanic
Jordanian
Surinamese
Taiwanese
Bahrainian
Bhutanese
Lithuanian
Mauritian
Uruguayan
American
Guyanese
Ivoirian
Maltese
Niuean

Distribution of racial resentment for all subjects using using Black and each individual group as the target.

15
 We also compared average resentment toward Blacks to average resentment toward
whites, which is both an in-group for a majority of respondents and a group that is well-
known and easily identified by survey respondents. In Table 1, we see that respondents
expressed higher average resentment toward whites than toward Blacks. Note also that in
Figure 2 the distribution of attitudes when Hispanics are the target group are also simi-
lar to Blacks. Since respondents are more likely have preconceived attitudes or stereotypes
about whites and Hispanics than they are about another non-Black target group this further
suggests that an underlying ideological belief system motivates responses regardless of the
target group under scrutiny.

Ideology and Racial Liberalism

On average, subjects express similar levels of resentment toward Blacks and non-Blacks,
which suggests that these scales may capture a latent attitude that is non-specific to Blacks.
However, liberals and conservatives may respond differently to the experiment: liberals are
expected to be more sympathetic to Blacks, and conservatives may have an underlying belief
system that contributes to both ideology and racial resentment. Figure 3 displays resentment
groups could stem from incoherent attitudes or a lack of knowledge about the non-Black target groups in
question. Although we believe the strength of our test lies in the relative obscurity and variety of the target
groups we selected, in order to test this possibility of incoherent attitudes, we compared levels of resentment
when respondents correctly or incorrectly identified the geographical origin of the non-Black target. Overall,
58 percent of respondents who were asked about geographic origin were able to correctly identify the target
group’s geography, and knowledge was consistent among both liberals and conservatives at 58 and 57 percent,
respectively. Using geographic knowledge as a proxy for group knowledge, this suggests that the majority
of respondents were at least able to recognize the non-standard target groups as a meaningful entity. More
importantly, there is no significant difference in our formal tests comparing resentment towards Blacks and
non-Black target groups depending on respondent’s preexisting knowledge of the group in question (see
Appendix).
Another possibility is that individuals who have no well-formed opinion about a target group simply chose
the middle response category of 3 on the Likert Scale (corresponding to “Neither Agree nor Disagree”) on
all questions. This is, of course, difficult to separate from subjects who choose the middle response category
because of a genuine attitude. It is notable that a median result of 3 is found across almost all target groups,
including those about which subjects are more likely to have well-formed opinions, like Blacks, as well as for
more obscure groups, making it seem less likely that a median response of 3 represents a non-attitude. To
test if subjects who responded with a default response of 3 were driving the results, we simply reanalyzed
the results with subjects who answered 3 to every question removed. The results were unchanged.

16
 Figure 3: Distribution of Racial Resentment by Ideology with Different Target Groups

5.0 ●
●
4.5 ●

4.0
Resentment

3.5
3.0
2.5
2.0
1.5 ● ● ●

1.0 ● ● ●
Black

Black

White

White

Other

Other
Liberal

Conservative

Liberal

Conservative

Liberal

Conservative
Distribution of racial resentment using Black, white, and all other groups as the target, by liberal (gray boxes)
and conservative (white boxes) respondents. All other racial groups are collapsed together in this graphic.
The dotted line represents the mean resentment against Blacks.

by target group and respondent self-reported ideology.8

The dotted line in this figure represents the mean resentment for all subjects when Black is
the target group. Three important features are prominent in this figure: First, conservatives
respondents (white boxes) show more resentment toward all groups than do liberals (gray
boxes). Second, for conservatives, the distribution of resentment is nearly identical when
asked about a white and Black target group to the distribution when asked about any
alternate group, except with a slightly lower median. Third, for liberals, responses for the
Black target group are significantly lower than for other groups, indicating that liberals may
have greater sympathy for Blacks.
8
In the Appendix, we replicate our primary results using other measures of ideology based on gender
attitudes and foreign policy attitudes, and find that the results are substantively unchanged. This helps
demonstrate that the relationship between attitudes about Blacks, non-Blacks, and conservatism likely does
not spring entirely from attitudes about Blacks, but rather a broader set of attitudes.

17
 This demonstrates that the relatively lower average resentment toward Blacks we see
in our aggregate results is driven entirely by liberals. We can see this in formal tests, as
well. Looking again at Table 1, for conservatives, the differences between responses for the
Black target group and responses for other groups cannot be reliably distinguished from zero
(p = 0.61 and p = 0.14, respectively). For conservatives, the point estimate on the difference
between Blacks and other group is also relatively small—the effect is less than half the size
of the absolute value among liberals of the difference between resentment toward Blacks
and resentment toward other groups. The standardized effect size of the difference between
Blacks and non-Blacks for conservatives is β = .16, for liberals it is β = .38.
In short, it appears that, although conservatives are more resentful overall, when it comes
to attitudes about Blacks, these scales are more effectively capturing racial liberalism than
specific anti-Black affect associated with conservatism. Furthermore, the inconsistent results
among liberals, in contrast to the consistent results among conservatives, is evidence that
a common feature of conservatism and intergroup attitudes is driving responses to these
questions.

Racial Resentment and Policy Attitudes

To further assess the attitudes underlying modern racism, we explore whether modern
racism scales predict race-related policy attitudes when resentment is measured for target
groups other than Blacks. Testing the relationship between racial resentment questions and
policy views is a common technique used to assess how well modern racism scales measure
anti-Black attitudes (Sears et al., 1997; Sears and Henry, 2003). These tests typically include
racial resentment in a regression with ideology and other control variables, and demonstrate
that racial resentment has independent predictive power. Although such evidence is sugges-
tive, it only demonstrates that racial resentment has additional explanatory power beyond
ideology and does not preclude the possibility that racial resentment is capturing attitudes

18
that are non-specific to Blacks. By subjecting racial resentment to an experimental test,
we are able to directly test whether attitudes about Blacks specifically are driving policy
attitudes, or if these attitudes reflect a more general belief system related to fairness.
Sears et al. (1997) examined the relationship between racial resentment and preferences
for affirmative action, which they call a “race targeted policy.” Using our TESS data, we
examine the relationship between racial resentment and attitudes about affirmative action
and the death penalty which have been previously linked to racial resentment (Unnever
and Cullen, 2007). In this and all following analysis, we use the racial resentment values
generated for the between subjects tests above, so a given subject’s resentment is measured
only for the group they were randomly assigned to see first, either Black or a non-Black
target group. Similar to Sears et al. (1997), we find that the relationship between Black
resentment and attitudes toward the death-penalty and affirmative action is strong even
when controlling for party identification and ideology. These results are displayed in Table 2
in columns 1 and 3. However, in columns 2 and 4 we substitute Blacks for non-Black target
groups and find that the estimated relationship between non-Black resentment and policy
attitudes is remarkably similar. This very strongly suggests that the relationship between
racial resentment and policy attitudes is not driven by attitudes specific to Blacks, but rather
represent a general psychological orientation, in which stereotypes are applied similarly to
any target group.
We also examine how well racial resentment predicts attitudes toward Obama and Obama
policy. Racial resentment has been shown to be strongly correlated with both general support
for Obama and support for public policy associated with Obama. Indeed, Tesler and Sears
(2010) compellingly demonstrated that racial attitudes predicted support for Obama over
Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic Primary. On the face of it, since Clinton and Obama
had similar policy positions, this seems to provide evidence that candidate support was
driven by racial attitudes. Of course, policy similarities not-withstanding, differences in

19
 Table 2: Regression of Policy Support on Resentment
(1) (2) (3) (4)
Affirmative Action Death Penalty
Black Non Black Black Non Black
Black Resentment 0.46∗ 0.35∗
(0.05) (0.07)
Non-Black Resentment 0.51∗ 0.35∗
(0.08) (0.09)
Conservative 0.20∗ 0.17 0.10 0.38∗
(0.10) (0.09) (0.14) (0.11)
Democrat 0.02 -0.37 -0.29 0.29
(0.22) (0.24) (0.30) (0.29)
Republican 0.08 0.01 -0.14 0.32
(0.23) (0.25) (0.30) (0.29)
Intercept 1.55∗ 1.59∗ 1.95∗ 1.41∗
(0.27) (0.33) (0.36) (0.39)
N 251 444 254 446
R2 0.35 0.22 0.15 0.09
adj. R2 0.34 0.21 0.13 0.08
Resid. sd 0.65 0.78 0.91 0.96

Regression of Affirmative Action (columns 1 and 2) and Death Penalty (columns 3 and 4) support on anti-
Black resentment (columns 1 and 3) and non-Black resentment (columns 2 and 4). Standard errors are in
parentheses. * is p < .05

support for Obama and Clinton could also be driven by non-policy related attitudes that are
not specific to Blacks. Alternatively, it could also be driven by racial sympathy rather than
racial resentment, hence the need for an experimental test.
Using our TESS sample, we look at a battery of ten questions about favorability toward
Obama policies that were asked of the survey panel at an earlier time. Each is coded as a
binary variable with 1 representing an unfavorable opinion. Using exploratory factor analysis
on these variables, we extracted three factors, which roughly correspond to domestic policy,
foreign policy, and a third factor consisting of education and environmental policies.9 We
separately scale the variables from each factor into a simple mean.
At first glance, the relationship between Black resentment and attitudes toward Obama
seems to support the argument that racial resentment scales capture attitudes specific to
Blacks, since racial resentment is strongly associated with attitudes toward Obama policies,
9
The foreign policy factor consists of foreign policy generally, immigration, and terrorism. The domestic
policy factor consists of health care, the economy, deficit, taxes, and energy.

20
while non-Black attitudes are more weakly associated. When we regress Obama foreign
policy support on anti-Black racial attitudes, party identification, and ideology, we find a
coefficient estimate of β = .15 with t = 5.98 on racial resentment. The same model, but
with non-Black resentment instead, yields β = .04 and t = 1.27.
However, these linear regressions are deceiving because they obscure the relationship
noted above: that liberals have particularly sympathetic attitudes toward Blacks. These
sympathetic attitudes appear to spill-over into support for Obama policy. Although the
causal direction of the relationship cannot be determined by this test, similar to the argu-
ment of Tesler (2012), it appears that liberal attitudes toward Blacks—which are far more
positive than are those of non-liberals—are affecting attitudes about Obama’s policies and
this induces a tight-linear relationship between Black resentment and Obama attitudes. How-
ever, no such relationship exists for liberal attitudes toward other groups. Conservatives, on
the other hand, show a consistent relationship between their resentment toward Black and
non-Black target groups and attitudes toward Obama policies.
This difference in liberal and conservative resentment relative to policy support can be
seen in Figure 4 where we graph the relationship between resentment and Obama foreign
policy attitudes for all respondents. The solid line represents a lowess curve of Black resent-
ment on support for Obama foreign policy (with higher numbers meaning more unfavorable)
and the dotted line represents a lowess curve of non-Black resentment. The distribution of
Black resentment among self-identified liberals is plotted along the bottom margin and Black
resentment among conservatives along the top margin. The difference in the distributions
of resentment for conservatives and liberals is plainly evident, with conservatives clustered
at the high end and liberals at the low end. Even when a lowess fit allows the line to freely
conform to the data, there is an obvious linear relationship between Black resentment and
racial attitudes. By contrast, the relationship between non-Black resentment and Obama
attitudes is nonlinear. The separation of the lines on the left-hand side of the figure indi-

21
cates that the difference in fit between Obama attitudes and resentment is not driven by
individuals with higher levels of resentment, but rather by those with low resentment scores.
In short, individuals who express higher resentment, regardless of the target group in ques-
tion, are highly consistent in their attitudes toward Obama policies. On the other hand,
individuals with low racial resentment—political liberals—appear to be strongly influenced
by their attitudes about Blacks in particular.10
Looking across Obama policy issues, and even at voting for Obama in 2012, we see the
same pattern: for conservatives, the relationship between resentment and political attitudes
is similar, regardless of the target group, but for liberals, the relationship between Black
resentment and policy attitudes is nearly twice as large as the relationship between non-
Black resentment and policy attitudes. Tesler and Sears (2010) argue that the election of
Obama saw “two side of racialization,” with opposition against Obama driven by racial
resentment and support for Obama driven by racial liberalism. Our findings suggests that
modern racism scales better capture only one side of this racialization: rather than measuring
racial resentment, modern racism scales appear to capture racial sympathy among liberals.
These results cast doubt on using correlations with policy attitudes to defend racial
resentment as a measure of attitudes specific to African Americans. While a great deal of
research has drawn on policy correlations as evidence for the scales’ effectiveness, these results
demonstrate that measures of association alone are insufficient to identify the mechanism
behind modern racism questions, which we believe our experiment is uniquely designed to
test. This data suggest that Black resentment, as measured by modern racism scales, does
not drive policy attitudes. Instead, the correlations between modern racism and policy
attitudes appear to primarily capture racial liberalism.
10
When we divide the sample into liberals and conservatives and look at separate bivariate OLS regressions
of Obama foreign policy support on Black resentment and non-Black resentment, we see that for conservatives
the coefficients are quite similar: β = .099 and .073, respectively. By contrast, for liberals, the coefficient on
Black resentment is much stronger than for other groups: β = .132 and .068, respectively.

22
 Figure 4: Racial Resentment and Approval of Obama Foreign Policy

Treatment
Black
Non Black

1.0

0.5

23
Unfavorable Obama Foreign Policy
0.0

1 2 3 4 5
Resentment
Approval of Obama foreign policy relative to resentment toward Black (solid line) and non-Black (dashed line) target groups, with 95% confidence
intervals displayed. Racial resentment of liberals is displayed on the bottom axis in and conservatives on the top (both distributions are jittered
for visual ease).
Belief in a Just World and Modern Racism

As previously discussed, we might expect conservatives to have higher levels of racial

resentment regardless of the target group because of a dispositional tendency to believe
people “get what they deserve.” By this logic, political conservatives would be willing to
endorse any statement that said some group of people would be better off if they worked
harder.11
In multiple samples, we included measures of just world belief (Lipkus, 1991). This
measure is constructed from a six-point Likert scale asking for agreement with statements
such as “I feel that people get what they are entitled to have” (see Appendix for complete
scale). Looking at our TESS data, we note that just world belief is significantly higher
for self-identified conservatives than for liberals (conservatives = 3.75, liberals = 3.07, t =
16.73, p < .01), consistent with theories of conservatism as motivated cognition (Jost et al.,
2003).
We treat racial resentment as the dependent variable and examine its relationship with
just world belief to see if it varies across target group. We show these relationships in
Table 3. In columns 1 and 3, we regress racial resentment for all target groups (Black
and non-Black) on just world belief and we find a strong relationship for both liberals and
conservatives. However, in columns 2 and 4, we interact just world belief with a treatment
variable indicating whether the subjects were randomly questioned about a Black or non-
Black target group. For conservatives (column 4), the coefficient on the interaction variable
is small and statistically insignificant, indicating that conservatives apply this same just
world belief, regardless of whether they are asked about Blacks or non-Black groups. This
11
Another possibility is that modern racism scales simply measure ethnocentrism Kinder and Kam (2009)
and that ethnocentrism is higher in conservatives. However, if this were true, we would likely expect white
respondents to express lower resentment when whites are the target group, but we do not find this to be
the case. We also find that liberal respondents actually have higher resentment toward whites than Blacks.
We also note that the ethnocentrism measures developed by Kinder and Kam (2009) would be poorly suited
to adjudicate between Black and non-Black resentment because the ethnocentrism measures ask specifically
about Blacks.

24
Table 3: Racial Resentment Regressed on Just World Belief and Treatment of Black Target
Group
(1) (2) (3) (4)
Liberals Conservatives
Intercept 1.98∗ 2.59∗ 2.74∗ 2.74∗
(0.16) (0.18) (0.19) (0.22)
Just World Belief 0.29∗ 0.12∗ 0.18∗ 0.14∗
(0.05) (0.06) (0.05) (0.06)
Black Target Group -2.05∗ -0.05
(0.33) (0.41)
Black Target Group x Just World Belief 0.57∗ 0.10
(0.10) (0.11)
N 194 194 249 249
R2 0.15 0.30 0.04 0.11
adj. R2 0.14 0.29 0.04 0.09
Resid. sd 0.66 0.60 0.64 0.62

OLS regression of racial resentment regressed on just world belief and treatment of Black target group versus
non-Black target for self-identified liberals (columns 1–2) and conservatives (columns 3–4). Standard errors
are in parentheses. * is p < .05

result is consistent with our argument that the conservative world view contains the belief
that any individual can get ahead with adequate effort, and this belief can subsequently
apply to any target group, perhaps especially low-status groups.
For liberals (column 2) on the other hand, the effect of just world belief is strongly condi-
tioned on the target group, with just world belief only becoming important when liberals are
asked about African Americans. This is consistent with the argument that just world belief
is not a central part of liberals’ world view, and our results show that, unlike conservatives,
liberals do not apply this belief to all groups.12
The nature of this relationship between just world belief and liberal sympathy for African
Americans deserves further investigation. It could be that the very liberal people at the
bottom of the just world belief scale are particularly sensitive to the historical plight of
African Americans or it could be that knowledge about the plight of African Americans has
contributed to their belief that the world is unjust. It is also be the case that liberals who
favor the policies historically championed by liberals that were originally constructed to help
12
In two surveys, we asked about the related concept of “System Justification” (Jost and Banaji, 1994),
also thought to be related to conservatism, and find consistent results.

25
African Americans, such as affirmative action, might adopt a belief in an unjust world and
sympathy for African Americans, in order to maintain cognitive consistency. In either case,
it is liberals, rather than conservatives, who hold attitudes specific to African Americans.
The strength and consistency with which just world belief correlates with both Black
and non-Black resentment among conservatives is consistent with theories of conservatism
as motivated cognition, such that conservatives are driven to endorse stereotypes about low
work ethic and deservingness to justify existing inequality. As we have argued thus far, this
suggests that modern racism attitudes are characterized by a general set of attitudes about
fairness, perhaps reflecting a change in how stereotypes are applied to a broader set of target
groups.

Discussion

In this paper, we have demonstrated that average resentment, as measured by modern

racism scales, is generally similar across all target groups, and where it does vary, this
variation seems mostly driven by liberals. For conservatives, modern racism scales seem
to measure a more general orientation toward fairness, such as a belief in a just world.
Importantly, our results indicate that, especially among political conservatives, the attitudes
contained in modern racism are applied to a broader range of groups than African Americans
alone.
Additionally, our results can speak to the central debate around the theory and mea-
surement of modern racism: the extent to which the scales can be properly said to measure
racism in the form of anti-Black affect. To address this question, it is useful to consider lib-
erals and conservatives separately, because as our results suggest, liberals and conservatives
likely draw on different belief systems when answering these questions.
Liberals show consistently lower levels of resentment toward Blacks than toward other

26
groups. Given that the correlation between resentment and policies is only present when
Blacks are the target group, this suggests that liberals have special attitudes toward Blacks
that shape their answers to these questions. The source of these attitudes is also unclear—
they could result from a recognition of the historical and ongoing discrimination faced by
African Americans, or from an affective or ideological commitment to African American
empowerment. Our data does not allow us to separate these causes.
By contrast, conservatives respond consistently across all target groups. The most obvi-
ous interpretation of this result is that modern racism scales do not capture anti-Black affect.
Presumably, such affect would cause respondents to react differently to questions that ask
about Blacks than they do to questions that ask about other groups. There is, however, a
more complex explanation for the role of anti-Black affect in conservative responses: that
it is the presence of anti-Black affect, rather than its absence, that causes conservatives to
answer similarly regardless of the target group. This interpretation recognizes the historical
injustices leveled at Blacks, and posits that conservatives choose to ignore this unique history
because of a particular affect against Blacks.
Although we cannot directly test for this relationship, we suggest a more parsimonious
model, that conservatives are motivated by a belief in a just world. This model is broadly
consistent with major psychological models of conservatism. Moreover, the overall higher
levels of resentment among conservatives that we observe is consistent with the idea that just
world belief drives responses—conservatives are likely to agree with the statement that if
somebody would only work harder they could get ahead, regardless of the group in question.
This belief can, of course, manifest in attitudes that could be interpreted as racism.
Indeed, one of the principal attitudes the modern racism scale is designed to measure is
the belief that “Blacks no longer face discrimination as they once did” (Tarman and Sears,
2005). If this belief causes people to oppose policies aimed as righting historical injustices,
this could arguably be called a racist belief system. From the perspective of promoting racial

27
equality through policy, such as affirmative action, this represents a major hurdle for building
support for such policies. Some conservative opponents may oppose the policy not because
of ideological principle, but rather because they disagree with a primary justification of the
policy: that historical injustices faced by African Americans impede their contemporary
social and economic progress.
We do note, however, that from a scientific perspective, labeling consistent responses
across target groups as racist raises a thorny issue. The scales were designed to mea-
sure racism toward Blacks, and decades of scholarly literature have claimed that the re-
sponses given by conservatives represented racism because the scales were specifically target-
ing Blacks. However, we show that conservatives give consistent answers regardless of the
target group, which implies that these attitudes are not unique to Blacks. If the non-specific
treatment of Blacks can also be claimed to be measuring racism, then it is not clear if these
scales are usefully distinguishing racist from non-racist attitudes.
None of this is to say that these scales did not once measure specific anti-Black resent-
ment. It is very possible that the nature of racial attitudes and conservatism has changed in
the more than forty years since the scales were first developed. Our findings are consistent
across respondent age cohorts, indicating that these results do not just reflect the dying out
of a generation with particular anti-Black attitudes. Rather, the consistency between Black
and non-Black resentment across cohorts suggests that either 1) responses to a Black target
group and to a non-Black target group have always been similar, perhaps because of the
underlying belief system we discuss, or 2) a change in political rhetoric has caused a shift in
attitudes across all age groups.
While our data does not allow us to directly test these two possibilities, recent scholarship
and political events appear to support the second claim. Recent research suggests that at-
titudes about deservingness have been especially activated by contemporary political trends
(Cramer, 2016), and recent xenophobic political rhetoric, such as during Trump’s campaign,

28
has targeted an array of groups, not just African Americans. To that end, our evidence sug-
gests that social scientists should seek new instruments to measure group-specific prejudice
that may be distinct from this broad form of resentment. Indeed, as we stated earlier, the
original impetus for the modern racism scales was that the nature of racial attitudes had
changed, such that questions designed to measure an old-fashioned type of racism were no
longer adequate. A similar shift could also have taken place, in which African Americans are
not singled out, at least by conservatives, as targets of the same unique racism to which they
were subject over thirty years ago, but rather attitudes about fairness are widely applied
across groups.
The theory of modern racism is centrally important to our understanding of intergroup
attitudes. As argued by Tesler and Sears (2010), racial attitudes occupy a “focal place in
modern-day partisan politics (p 16).” To that end, it is crucial that researchers constantly
and skeptically examine our instruments of measure for this important topic. In addition
to better understanding the components of intergroup attitudes, a goal of our research has
been to improve our central measures in these domains, a mission that we hope will remain
ongoing.

29
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 Figure A.1: Anti-Black Racial Resentment by Four and Three Question Scales

5.0

4.5

4.0

3.5

3.0

2.5

2.0

1.5

1.0
4 Question 3 Question
Scale Scale

Distribution of Anti-Black Racial Resentment as measured using four question scale (left box) and three
question scale (right box).

Online Appendix
Tables A.1 and A.2 display the details of each trial and a summary of our subjects,
respectively.
In Figure A.1 we present the distribution of resentment as a function of the standard
four question scale and our modified three question scale across the ten tests in which we
ran both versions. Subjects only saw one or the other version. Mean resentment is nearly
identical when measured on both scales (2.83 and 2.86) and the median is actually slightly
higher using the 3-question scale.13 Cronbach’s Alpha (α) for the four question scale is 0.88
and is 0.84 with the slavery question removed.14
In Figure A.2, we see that average Black and non-Black resentment are largely consistent
13
Our mean resentment scores are lower than the mean of 3.44 in 2012 Cooperative Congressional Analysis
Project (CCAP), but this should be expected with the over-sample of liberals in MTurk and DLABSS
samples. Our averages are also close the historical averages reported by Tesler and Sears (2010). Using only
our TESS sample, the mean (weighted by survey weights) is 3.17.
14
In the 2012 CCAP, α = 0.86.

33
 Table A.1: Summary of Experiment Trials
Trial Platform N Groups Scales Question Number of Questions
Wording
1 mTurk 204 Black, White, Hispanic, Albanian, Angolan, None In US 3- and 4-question
Surinamese, Taiwanese, Jordanian scales
2 mTurk 405 Black, White, Hispanic, Lithuanian, Modern Sexism, foreign policy In US 3- and 4-question
Bhutanese, Uruguayan, Mauritanian, Bahraini attitudes scales
3 mTurk 834 Black, White, Hispanic, Lithuanian, Modern Sexism, Obama In US 3- and 4-question
Bhutanese, Uruguayan, Mauritanian, Bahraini approval, support for Oba- scales
macare, foreign policy atti-
tudes
4 mTurk 504 Black, White, Hispanic, Niuean, Ivoirian, Modern Sexism, Obama In US 3- and 4-question
Guyanese, Maltese approval, support for Oba- scales
macare, foreign policy atti-
tudes
5 mTurk 445 Black, White, Hispanic, Lithuanian, Modern Sexism, Obama In US 3- and 4-question
Bhutanese, Uruguayan, Mauritanian, Bahraini approval, support for Oba- scales
macare, foreign policy atti-
tudes

34
6 mTurk 508 Black, White, Hispanic, Albanian, Angolan, System justification, ethnocen- In US 3- and 4-question
Surinamese, Taiwanese, Jordanian trism, Obama approval, sup- scales
port for Obamacare, Obama
vote
7 mTurk 553 Black, White, Hispanic, Albanian, Angolan, Just World, ethnocentrism, In US 3- and 4-question
Surinamese, Taiwanese, Jordanian Obama approval, support for scales
Obamacare, Obama vote
8 mTurk 1,035 Black, Mauritanian, Surinamese Just World, racial policy at- Original 3-question scale only
titudes, attitudes toward in-
equality
9 DLABSS 188 Black, White, Hispanic, Niuean, Ivoirian, Modern Sexism, Obama In US 3- and 4-question
Guyanese, Maltese approval, support for Oba- scales
macare, foreign policy atti-
tudes
10 DLABSS 534 Black, White, Hispanic, Niuean, Ivoirian, System justification, ethnocen- In US 3- and 4-question
Guyanese, Maltese trism scales
11 DLABSS 756 Black, Mauritanian, Surinamese Just World Original 3-question scale only
12 TESS 733 Black, Mauritanian, Surinamese Just World, Obama approval, Original 3- question scale only
support for Obamacare,
Obama vote, racial policy
attitudes
 Table A.2: Demographics of Subjects
Total mTurk DLABSS TESS
N 6699 4488 1478 733
White 0.70 0.72 0.66 0.70
Black 0.07 0.07 0.05 0.11
Hispanic 0.06 0.05 0.06 0.10
Male 0.48 0.54 0.31 0.49
College Degree 0.49 0.49 0.59 0.28
Average Age 36.02 32.59 39.89 48.52
Conservative 0.22 0.21 0.19 0.37

Table A.3: Differences of Means in Racial Resentment by Question Wording

In US Original
Black Mean 2.80 2.85
Black SD 1.06 1.04
Other Mean 3.02 2.92
Other SD 0.80 0.68
N 4175 2524

Mean results for surveys asking about groups “in United States” or original question wording, which did not
include this modifier. For each group, we display the mean and standard deviation from the question with a
Black target group or other target groups, except for white and Hispanic, and the N.

35
 Figure A.2: Racial Resentment with Black and Other Target Group by Platform

5.0 ● ● ● ● ●
● ● ●
4.5 ● ●

4.0 ●
Resentment

3.5
3.0
2.5 ●

2.0 ●
●
1.5 ● ● ●

1.0 ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

MTurk DLABSS TESS

Distribution of Anti-Black Racial Resentment (dark bars) and all other groups collapsed (light bars) across
different platforms. Dotted line is mean resentment toward Blacks across all surveys.

across survey samples and survey platforms. Black resentment tends to be lower in the
DLABSS samples, because of the large proportion of liberals in the sample.

Just World Belief Scale

The following questions constitute the Global Belief in a Just World scale (Lipkus, 1991).
Response options are a six-point Likert scale from “Strongly Disagree” to “Strongly Agree.”

1. I feel that people get what they are entitled to have.

2. I feel that a person’s efforts are noticed and rewarded.

3. I feel that people earn the rewards and the punishments they get.

4. I feel that people who meet with misfortune have brought in on themselves.

5. I feel that people get what they deserve.

6. I feel that rewards and punishments are fairly given.

7. I basically feel that the world is a fair place.

36
 Table A.4: Tests of Differences of Means in Racial Resentment by Platform
All Liberals Conservatives
Platform Difference T-value N Difference T-value N Difference T-value N
1 MTurk -0.13 -1.09 184 -0.15 -1.01 112 -0.14 -0.57 33
2 MTurk -0.18 -1.97 375 -0.31 -2.64 211 0.22 1.13 70
3 MTurk -0.14 -1.40 710 -0.26 -2.07 416 -0.13 -0.79 133
4 MTurk -0.05 -0.54 464 -0.10 -0.78 257 0.22 1.42 96
5 MTurk -0.29 -2.96 432 -0.36 -2.60 228 -0.24 -1.44 100
6 MTurk -0.11 -1.25 475 -0.31 -2.94 252 0.20 1.30 102
7 MTurk -0.28 -3.13 486 -0.43 -3.34 226 -0.01 -0.06 118
8 MTurk -0.04 -0.64 1011 -0.10 -1.31 524 0.03 0.26 232
9 DLABSS -0.01 -0.08 145 -0.03 -0.16 91 0.55 1.37 14
10 DLABSS -0.31 -3.00 327 -0.25 -2.16 203 -0.12 -0.62 68
11 DLABSS -0.14 -1.87 556 -0.22 -2.84 360 0.30 2.26 131
12 TESS 0.10 1.57 711 -0.23 -1.81 198 0.34 3.81 263

Mean results for all subjects, conservatives, and liberals by platform. For each group, we display the between
subjects difference in means between Black and all non-Black groups other than whites, the test statistic from
a T-test for difference in means from Blacks, and the N. N is only for subjects comparing Black to groups
other than whites, so the N is different than the total N for a survey displayed in Table A.1.

Alternative Measures of Political Conservatism

A potential objection to our analysis is that responses to modern racism scales, even when
using other target groups, is driven by anti-Black animus because anti-Black animus causes
political conservatism in the first place and conservatism drives other attitudes. This could be
true, for example, if conservative political ideology is caused by attitudes toward Blacks and,
in turn, these conservative political beliefs cause resentment toward other groups, a “Just
World Belief,” or a general resentment of “free-loading.” This is an important objection
because attitudes toward Blacks have been persuasively argued to be “symbolic attitudes”
that are formed early in life and come to dominate other beliefs (Sears, 1993; Sears and
Henry, 2003).
While not objecting to the argument that attitudes toward Blacks can spill-over into other
domains, we check for the possibility that anti-Black animus is underlying responses to all our
questions by measuring political conservatism using variables that are plausibly independent
of racial attitudes. If, when political ideology is measured independently of racial attitudes,
political conservatives still respond consistently across all groups, this gives us confidence
that political conservatism is correlated with a general tendency to endorse these statements,
and that this tendency is driven by something other than anti-Black animus.
We construct alternative measures of conservatism using the “Modern Sexism Scale”
created by Swim et al. (1995), which we asked on five of our surveys. This scale is believed
to measure underlying sexist attitudes, reflected in the denial of sex discrimination and
antagonism toward women’s demands. We coded respondents scoring higher than the median
on Modern Sexism as conservative and lower than the median as liberal and replicated our
analysis above.
In Table A.6 we display these results, which are very similar to those categorized by self-

37
 Table A.5: Tests of Differences of Means in Racial Resentment by Knowledge of Target Group Geography
All Conservatives Liberals
Mean SD Diff p N Mean SD Diff p N Mean SD Diff p N

38
All Other 2.98 0.76 -0.16 0.00 3233.00 3.39 0.69 0.11 0.14 743.00 2.73 0.74 -0.28 0.00 1681.00
Correct 3.05 0.79 -0.23 0.00 921.00 3.58 0.72 -0.03 0.78 180.00 2.82 0.75 -0.35 0.00 529.00
Incorrect/Don’t Know 3.05 0.72 -0.23 0.00 618.00 3.41 0.67 0.08 0.37 136.00 2.85 0.70 -0.35 0.00 330.00
Mean results for all subjects, self-identified conservatives, and self-identified liberals. For each group, we display the mean, standard deviation,
difference in means from Black, the p-value associated with a T-test for difference in means from Blacks, and the N.
 Table A.6: Tests of Differences of Means in Racial Resentment by Modern Sexism
All Conservatives Liberals
Mean SD Diff p N Mean SD Diff p N Mean SD Diff p N
Black 2.86 1.04 780 3.40 0.85 334 2.46 0.99 446
White 3.16 0.77 -0.30 0.00 1075 3.34 0.70 0.07 0.20 467 3.03 0.80 -0.57 0.00 608

39
Other 3.05 0.78 -0.19 0.00 1310 3.34 0.68 0.06 0.24 560 2.83 0.78 -0.37 0.00 750

Mean results for all subjects, high Modern Sexism respondents (conservatives), and low Modern Sexism respondents (liberals). For each group,
we display the mean, standard deviation, difference in means from Black, the p-value associated with a T-test for difference in means from
Blacks, and the N. Standard errors are clustered by survey.
identified conservatism in Table 1, giving us more confidence that the tendency for political
conservatives to endorse these statements, regardless of the target group, is not driven by
anti-Black affect.
As an additional robustness check, we constructed another measure of political conser-
vatism, this one based on a simple two-question battery about military spending and U.S.
foreign policy. We asked these questions on five of our surveys and and we again coded
respondents scoring higher than the median as conservative and lower than the median as
liberal and replicated our analysis above. Table A.7 displays the results and the pattern is
once again broadly consistent, no matter how conservatism is defined.
These results increase our confidence that political conservatism is correlated with a
general tendency to endorse the statements on the Modern Racism Scale and that this
tendency does not spring from anti-Black animus. We turn next to a brief discussion of the
roots of attitudes underlying responses to the Modern Racism Scale.

40
 Table A.7: Tests of Differences of Means in Racial Resentment by Foreign Policy Attitudes
All Conservatives Liberals
Mean SD Diff p N Mean SD Diff p N Mean SD Diff p N
Black 2.86 1.04 780.00 3.18 1.04 230.00 2.73 1.02 550.00
White 3.16 0.77 -0.30 0.00 1075.00 3.26 0.79 -0.08 0.05 328.00 3.12 0.76 -0.39 0.00 747.00

41
Other 3.05 0.78 -0.19 0.00 1310.00 3.26 0.81 -0.09 0.20 379.00 2.97 0.75 -0.23 0.00 931.00

Mean results for all subjects, conservative foreign policy, and liberal foreign policy respondents. For each group, we display the mean, standard
deviation, difference in means from Black, the p-value associated with a T-test for difference in means from Blacks, and the N. Standard errors
are clustered by survey.