Study reveals where white Nevadans rank for racial bias

By Megan Messerly

Monday, Nov. 9, 2015 | 12:46 p.m.

White Nevadans showed more implicit bias against blacks than any other state in the West, according to a new study.

The finding comes from data gathered from 1.5 million people who volunteered to take the online Implicit Association Test, which examines implicit racial bias, unconscious preferences and stereotypes that affect the way that people react to others of a different race.

A psychologist from Lehigh University, Dominic Packer, who analyzed the results, argued that implicit bias was higher in states with higher ratios of black citizens to white citizens.

Among the 50 states, Nevada ranked nearly in the middle — both in its implicit bias score among whites and in its ratio of white to black citizens.

It has the 25th highest implicit bias score and the 29th highest ratio of white to black citizens.

The South and the East Coast, in general, show both the highest levels of implicit bias and the lowest ratios of white to black citizens. Mississippi, which has the lowest ratio of white to black citizens, also has the highest implicit bias score.

In his analysis, Parker looked at variables that could predict implicit bias, including racial segregation, median income, income inequality, the ratio of white to black residents, political preferences, social capital and a history of slave holding.

Though social capital, income inequality and slave holding all correlated with higher implicit bias scores, the strongest predictor was the ratio of white residents to black residents. The more white residents relative to black residents, the lower the implicit bias.

“The strong association between population composition and (implicit bias) scores is consistent with the idea that bias increases when and where there is greater perceived competition between groups,” Parker said. “In states where the African American outgroup comprises a larger proportion of the population, whites may perceive greater competition for political, cultural and economic resources.”

In The Washington Post, some scientists praised Packer’s work, which was not peer-reviewed, but they cautioned that there were a variety of other factors that could explain the relationship.

Speaking to the Post, Anthony Greenwald, a professor at the University of Washington who created the Implicit Association Test, pointed to Washington, D.C., as an outlier in the data. The district has a lower white-to-black ratio than any other state — blacks outnumber whites in D.C. — and also has one of the lowest implicit bias scores when ranked among the states. He said that a county-level analysis could reveal a rural-urban divide in implicit bias scores.

Research out of UNLV has actually shown Las Vegas and other cities in the West like Riverside, Calif., and Phoenix have among the lowest levels of black segregation from other groups compared to some of the other largest metropolitan areas.