I wish I was joking.
I wish this was The Onion.
I wish this was satire.
It's not. The results of a large UCLA study just published in the Official Journal of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, are, to say the least, disturbing.
In a study exploring racial bias and how people use their mind's-eye image of an imagined person's size to represent someone as either threatening or high-status, UCLA researchers found that people envisioned men with stereotypically black names as bigger and more violent.
The study, published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, sought to understand how the human brain's mechanism for interpreting social status evolved from the same mental systems that our early ancestors originally used to process threats. In a series of studies involving more than 1,500 people, the researchers found that an unknown black male is conceived of similarly to an unknown white male who has been convicted of assault.
And the participants in the study, it is worth noting, were overwhelmingly liberal.
During one version of the study, the mostly white participants, aged 18 to mid-70s, from all over the United States and self-identifying as slightly left of center politically, read one of two nearly identical vignettes. One featured a man named Jamal, DeShawn or Darnell, and the other featured Connor, Wyatt or Garrett -- monikers selected based on prior research into names most commonly associated with various ethnic groups.
In their own imagination, Jamal, DeShawn, and Darnell tended to be large men with violent tendencies while men named Connor, Wyatt, or Garrett were imagined as small, calm, men with a bent toward peace.
In other words—based on names alone—African American men start off as superhuman thugs in the imagination of white folk.
"I've never been so disgusted by my own data," said lead author Colin Holbrook, a research scientist in the anthropology department in the UCLA College. "The amount that our study participants assumed based only on a name was remarkable. A character with a black-sounding name was assumed to be physically larger, more prone to aggression, and lower in status than a character with a white-sounding name."
America. 2015. Wow.