EFFECTS OF RACE OF EXPERIMENTER AND TEST VS. NEUTRAL INSTRUCTIONS ON EXPRESSION OF HOSTILITY IN NEGRO BOYS

摘要

An experiment tested whether suppression of hostile responses occurs When a white adult makes Negro students take an intelligence test. Negro male students at a segregated high school in the South were given a test of aggression disguised as a concept formation test. Two equivalent forms of the test were administered on successive days. On the first day it was given informally to all subjects by a Negro teacher. The follow-ing day the entire sample was divided into four groups, each of which was tested by either a white or a Negro adult stranger, with instructions that described the task as either an intelligence test or a research instrument.nWhen neutral instructions were used on the second day, average change scores in both the white-tester and Negro-tester groups were about the same. But in the intelligence test condition, hostility scores increased over the previous day when the experimenter was a Negro, and they decreased when the experimenter was white. The interpretation is that both administrators instigated hostile impulses when they used test instructions. Students revealed their annoyance on the hostility ques¬tionnaire when the experimenter was Negro, but with a white tester the need to deny hostile feelings resulted in avoidance of aggressive word meanings.