Conditioned autonomic responses as bidirectional indicators of racial attitude

Present physiological techniques of attitude measurement tap attitude intensity but not attitude direction. An alternative physiological technique, based upon the phenomenon of semantic generalization of conditioned autonomic responses, was tested to determine whether it would provide a bidirectional indicator of attitude. Subjects with favorable or unfavorable self-reported attitudes toward blacks were conditioned to statements having no racial content which they had previously evaluated as "bad." Subsequently, they were presented with statements with racial content; the latter were sentences which would be differentially evaluated as "good" or "bad" by persons with dissimilar racial attitudes. It was hypothesized that racial attitude would predict conditioned autonomic responses elicited by the generalization statements. It was found that groups differing in racial attitude could be distinguished on the basis of their conditioned responses to the race-related generalization statements. Unresolved problems of interpretation are discussed.