Racist Attitudes Linked To Future Psychological Distress – But Could Both Be Fueled By Something Else?

Prejudice towards outgroups is a persistent feature of human society, even though it is not an inevitable one. For years, researchers have sought to understand where such negative attitudes come from and how they are maintained across time. Frequently, both academic research and media coverage claim that racism is an outcome of poor mental health. For instance, academics often describe racism as a “pathology”, while more popular forums explain racially driven incidents of mass violence – such as mass shootings – as the result of psychotic behavior and poor mental health.

In other contexts, researchers have explored the association between prejudice and negative personality traits, such neuroticism, narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Meanwhile counterterrorism strategists warn that mental health issues are often key risk factors for radicalization.

While there is some evidence to support the idea that these psychopathologies are associated with different forms of prejudice, it is a weak connection. At the same time, the belief has very poor predictive power and can even lead to stigmatization for people with mental health disorders who are not racist or prejudiced.

It seems academics rarely ask themselves whether their underpinning assumptions about the relationship between negative attitudes and mental health are correct. In the existing work, most attention has been paid to the impact these toxic views have on the targets of their negativity.

Assessing racism

In order to address this, a team of Australian researchers flipped the idea and explored whether holding racist views can lead to mental health problems. They also wanted to see whether both prejudiced attitudes and mental ill-health could arise from a shared causal factor – social isolation.

The team examined data drawn from three longitudinal studies conducted in Australia. Each study had over 2,000 participants and three timepoints that spanned around six months.

The first study drew on data from a study of social psychological processes during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. The team ensured that the sample they examined was representative of the Australian adult population in terms of age, sex, ancestry, and income. They used an adapted measure to assess participant’s levels of racism based on social distancing preferences.

Participants were asked how much distance they would give people of different ethnicities compared to their family and friends. They were also asked to indicate how they felt about these outgroups based on a “feeling thermometer”.

The second study asked participants to indicate how they thought about the way Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples were treated in the country – for instance, did they believe it was “far worse than most Australians”, or “neutral”, or “a lot better than most Australians”, based on a scale of 0 to 100. The team interpreted results of 50 upwards as signs of racism. The authors wrote that the study thereby also brought to attention the pervasive myth in Australian culture that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples receive special treatment compared to non-Indigenous Australians.

In the third study, the team measured attitudes using a modified version of the Attitudes Towards Indigenous Australians Scale. Participants were asked to respond to items on a 7-point scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). For example, they were asked to place themselves on the scale in response to “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people work as hard as anyone else”. This is one of the most widely used measures of racism towards these communities in the literature.

In addition to measuring participants’ levels of racial prejudice, the team also measured participants’ mental health in each study. They assessed symptoms of common mental disorders in the first study, general psychological distress in the second study, and mental wellbeing in the third study.

They also probed these studies for information that captured the diversity of ways in which social connectedness occurred. In the first study they looked for participants' individual subjective sense of loneliness. In the second study, they assessed whether participants felt that the broader community and its institutions were trustworthy; and in the third study, they assessed the degree to which people identified with multiple social groups.

Social connections are key

The results across all three studies revealed a consistent pattern contingent on time. For instance, if the researchers examined a specific data point in time, there was no strong link between racist attitudes and psychological health. This would suggest that simply having a mental health condition is not a sign that someone is more likely to hold racist attitudes.

However, across the longer term, these studies do suggest a link whereby holding racist attitudes can predict a future decline in mental health. However, there is nuance here.

In the first study, the team saw a large spike in polarized discourse during the COVID-19 pandemic. This occurred at a time when people were debating the origins of the virus and wider racial prejudice was aimed at the Asian diaspora communities. Within this context, people were also experiencing heightened loneliness due to lockdown, demonstrating that loneliness acted as a fuel for both psychological distress and prejudice. The results also show that, while distress rebounded to a degree after the crisis passed and lockdown ended, the damage from holding racist attitudes persisted.

The second study, which took place after the pandemic and during the start of the war in Ukraine, found that the core pattern remained the same. This was also a time when more progressive political discourse was taking place in Australia and in the US, so it seems that the toxic effects of racist attitudes held even when the wider milieu was moving in less polarizing directions. So, while this study does suggest that poor mental health may lead to racism, it should be treated with caution.

Finally, the third study, which focused on connectedness as a function of being part of many different groups, found no evidence that psychological distress led to racism. In contrast, it showed strong evidence that having multiple social identities – being a sports fan, a volunteer, a parent – protected people from both prejudicial attitudes and psychological distress. The results indicates that the more social circles people belong to, the less likely they are to view outgroups as a problem.

“In three large surveys we found that increases in prejudiced attitudes consistently predicted increased psychological distress over time,” the team explain in their paper.

“There was also evidence that social connectedness consistently protected people against both of these negative outcomes, and in some cases fully accounted for the association between psychological distress and prejudice.”

The team recommend that researchers, policymakers, and practitioners should conceptualize mental health as a malleable outcome of social and attitudinal process, not just a fix attribute. Secondly, interventions should emphasize a need to build social connections and cohesion with the aim of assessing their benefits for both mental health and fending off prejudiced thinking.

“At a more general level, these conclusions speak to Goethe's insight that ‘in nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it and over it’,” the team conclude.

“In the world at large, this means that the more we examine factors in isolation, the more likely we are to find them perplexing. However, it also implies that when we study them together we are more likely to discover the unifying forces through which they shape each other.”

The study is published in Comprehensive Psychiatry.