Helping and the avoidance of inappropriate interracial behavior: A strategy that perpetuates a nonprejudiced self-image.

Investigated the view that racial prejudice among White Americans today is often expressed in subtle, indirect, and rationalizable ways. Whites may therefore regard themselves as unprejudiced and nondiscriminatory as they continue to disadvantage minorities. It was hypothesized that Whites would be less helpful to Blacks only when normative guidelines within the situation suggest that the failure to help would be justifiable and not necessarily inappropriate. However, Whites would not discriminate against Blacks when the failure to help would be clearly inappropriate. In the present experiment, the normative guidelines regarding the appropriateness of helping was varied by manipulating the causal locus of the recipient's need (internal or external) and the source of the helping request (the recipient or a 3rd-party observer). Supportive of the hypotheses, Ss' (130 White female university students) helping behavior discriminated against Black recipients only in the condition in which the recipients' needs were caused by their failure to work hard and the requests were issued by the recipients themselves (i.e., when the failure to help would not be regarded as particularly inappropriate). (46 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)