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Aversive Racism And Implicit Biases In Civil Rights Workers, Anne Nm Hobbs

Department of Sociology: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The aim of this study was to gain a better understanding of implicit mechanisms that perpetuate inequality. The vast majority of claims of discrimination in this country are filtered through the lens of a civil rights investigator. It is critical to our understanding of civil rights enforcement, and inequality overall, to assess the potential for implicit bias processes of non-judicial government employees to impact the outcome of discrimination cases. Social psychologists have long established that the human brain processes information in highly effective ways that may make it prone to stereotyping and error. I used a vignette methodology to assess …