Map Reveals Implicit Racism Across Europe

A map released by Mind Hacks illustrates the levels of racism in different European countries.

The map is based on scores from Harvard University’s Implicit Association Test, which is a reaction-based psychological test designed to measure implicit racial bias – in other words, the test looked at how easily people associate black faces with negative ideas.  The data was collected between 2002 and 2015, and 288,076 White Europeans participated.

The map is colour coded, with blue indicating low levels of racial bias, whilst red shows high levels.  The colour red is congregated primarily around countries in Eastern Europe, such as the Czech Republic.

Welcomingly, the UK is shown as blue on the map, suggesting that Brits show some of the lowest levels of implicit racial bias compared with our European neighbours.

Other countries marked as red on the map include Italy, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine.  Those ranking as blue with the UK include Norway, Sweden, Austria and Belgium.

The people behind Mind Hacks have said that the data collected demonstrated that:

‘in every country in Europe, people are slower to associate blackness with positive words such as “good” or “nice” and faster to associate blackness with negative concepts such as “bad” or “evil”.'

Whilst it is encouraging that the UK is on the lower end of implicit racial bias, it is still disappointing that no country had an average score below zero, which would reflect positive associations with blackness, according to Mind Hacks.  In fact, none had a score that was even close to zero.

Talia Robinson