Masters Theses

Date of Award

5-1995

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Major

Sociology

Major Professor

Suzanne B. Kurth

Committee Members

Michael Benson, Greer L. Fox

Abstract

Nonverbal misunderstandings often lead to faulty attributions in interracial interactions. This research explored what characteristics of students and what elements of interracial interactions might make a student more likely to choose a racial attribution to explain the behavior of an instructor in the classroom setting. One hundred thirty-six undergraduate sociology students completed a questionnaire and responded to vignettes that gathered demographic and attitudinal information. The demographic variables of interest to the study were the race, gender, age, and major of the student. The other independent variables in the study were the commitment the student reported to a racial identity, the number of friends of another race claimed by the student, and the perception held by the student of the general interracial climate on campus. The vignettes varied in the racial composition depicted (African-American instructor/white student. White instructor/African-American student, or neutral race), and in the behavior of the instructor that was portrayed (typecasting, exclusion, or dismissal). All results were reported only for one hundred twenty-three white respondents. Of all the independent variables, only racial identity seems to have any association with students' choices of attribution in the vignettes. White students did perceive preferential treatment based on race, but did not attribute racial motives to any behaviors of white instructors. Racial attributions were the category most often chosen only in vignettes in which the instructor was African-American and in the preferential treatment vignette. Finally, the inclusion of a word that suggests a racial element in a situation in which race was unspecified appeared to lead approximately a third of the students to choose a racial attribution. A plausible interpretation of the data is that white students operated according to a group-serving bias, in which situational attributions are made for the harmful behavior of an individual of their same race, while dispositional attributions are made for the harmful behavior of an individual of another race. Racial attributions in ambiguous interracial interactions may be made because of differences in nonverbal communication, the persistance of stereotypes, and distance between the races due to voluntary segregation. Situational selves may develop to be employed in interracial interaction in an attempt to relieve the anxiety that many people of both races feel when they interact. The explanation of differences in the details of nonverbal interaction between the races might help to improve race relations in the university and in all areas of society.

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