NaDiRa short study: Measuring subliminal prejudice

Creating online tools to measure implicit attitudes and behaviour

National Monitoring of Discrimination and Racism (NaDiRa)

Project head: Dr. Susanne Veit

Project team:

• Susanne Veit
• Iniobong Essien

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Project description:

The project develops the Open Science research tool MIND.set. It enables complex measurement methods to be easily and cost-effectively integrated into online surveys - without the time-consuming programming work that has been necessary up to now. It is suitable for large, representative samples as well as for small surveys. This enables scientists to gain new insights. In the spirit of Open Science, MIND.set will be available to all interested researchers in the future.

Results:

MIND.set is currently in the development and testing phase: programming and functionality testing have been completed. MIND.set is currently being optimised and expanded, and will initially be available to researchers at the DeZIM Institute for initial studies.

Specifically, we have created photos that make it possible to explore what survey participants associate with different people and how they behave towards them: white and black people, southern Europeans, people from the Middle East and East Asians. We also programmed four designs: an Implicit Association Test (IAT), the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP), the Police Officer Dilemma Task (PODT) and a self-designed tool. With the help of this tool, the clicking behaviour of test persons on predefined screen areas can be recorded.

Surprising insights:

We are excited about the insights into what conditions and influences racism, prejudice and discrimination made possible by experimental research designs using MIND.set.

Relevance to practice:

MIND.set is a research resource that will be freely available to academia in the future. MIND.set makes it possible to include complex research designs in online studies, especially designs with complex randomisations, visual stimuli and/or reaction time measurements. This promises important empirical findings and significant contributions to theory development.

Short studies in preparation for the Racism Monitor:

In order to prepare a comprehensive Racism Monitor, DeZIM called on scholars from the DeZIM research community in 2020 to develop innovative study ideas. These should extend existing research projects, pursue new and innovative approaches or build an infrastructure to research racism. By 2021, more than 120 researchers at the six locations of the DeZIM research community had conducted a total of 34 short studies. These are divided into six thematic priorities:

• Health system
• Education system and labour market
• Institutional racism
• Dealing with experiences of racism
• Participation and the media
• Racist ideologies and attitudes

Funding: Federal Ministry for Education, Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth (Third-party funding)