SAN DIEGO, Oct. 29 (UPI) -- University of Washington researchers suggest that white doctors implicitly favor whites over blacks.
Janice Sabin said this research is too preliminary to know if there is a direct relationship between physicians' implicit, or unconscious, racial attitudes and the quality of medical care.
Data from the study were drawn from a sample of more than 400,000 anonymous people who took the race attitude Implicit Association Test online from 2004 to 2006. More than 2,500 of the test-takers identified themselves as doctors. The race attitude and a variety of other tests that examine bias are at the Web site of Project Implicit operated by the University of Washington, University of Virginia and Harvard University.
The Implicit Association Test captures subconscious, or implicit, bias by asking people to quickly associate positive or negative words with a series of photographs.
Of 2,535 physicians taking the test, 76 percent identified themselves as U.S. residents and 66 percent said they were white. The majority of physicians in all racial and ethnic groups showed an implicit preference for white Americans compared to black Americans except for black physicians, who on average, did not favor either group.
Sabin presented the study at the American Public Health Association's annual meeting in San Diego.
