Rap Music Triggers Latent Sexism
In a study (abstract here) that appears in a recent issue of the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, Michael Cobb and William Boettcher begin by noting that:
Past research has found that exposure to rap music promotes racial stereotyping. Whites who watch violent rap videos, for example, generate more negative dispositional attributions of anonymous Black males’ behaviors. Critics say rap music is harmful, however, not only because it promotes racial stereotyping, but also because it encourages males’ anger and aggression toward women. The genre of ‘gangsta rap’ in particular is blamed for normalizing misogynistic attitudes by celebrating the physical abuse of women. Consequently, one explosive if unsubstantiated objection to rap is that ‘rap and rap just go together a little too well.’
The question, then, is whether exposure to misogynistic rap music does indeed result increased sexism among its listeners. To find out, Cobb and Boettcher conducted an experiment in which “Kill You,” a misogynistic rap song by Eminem and “Sabotage,” a nonmisogynistic rap song by the Beastie Boys, served as the stimulus materials. Unsurprisingly, the male participants in the experiment had higher sexism scores than did the female participants. Much more interestingly, males recorded consistently higher sexism scores after exposure to both kinds of rap. For females, the results were more complex: their scores increased only for “benevolent” as opposed to “hostile” sexism and only following exposure to the nonmisogynistic rap song.
Cobb and Boettcher interpret these results as “a partial victory for popular critics of misogynistic rap music, [which] …primes more sexist attitudes in males {and] … also primes more defensive attitudes in females. In a press release on the study, Cobb concludes that:
Sexism is imbedded in the culture we live in, and hearing rap music can spontaneously activate pre-existing awareness of sexist beliefs. …It’s unlikely that hearing lyrics in a song creates attitudes that did not previously exist. Instead, rap music, fairly or unfairly, has become associated with misogyny, and even minimal exposure to it can automatically activate these mental associations and increase their application, at least temporarily.
Comments
Interesting study!
But I wonder if part of the effect is driven by the emotions the music create. (After all, music is sometimes used as a tool to manipulate emotions.) Let us say that people get angry by the rap music. The consequence of this "incidental" anger is that they tend to think less and rely more on cognitive shortcuts such as stereotypes.
If this was true, then people would become more reliant on all sorts of stereotypes, so it would be easy to test this potential confound by also measuring attitudes towards other groups.
Lerner and Tiedens (2006) discuss some of the characteristics of an angry decision-maker.
Posted by: Jacob | March 3, 2008 12:12 AM
This was a weird choice of songs. "Kill You" is a particularly crazy song, not really in the same area as the more casual misogyny displayed by a lot of gangsta rap (referring to women as "bitches" and "hos" but not actually threatening to kill them). And "Sabotage" is barely a rap song.
Posted by: Jason | March 3, 2008 03:44 PM
Thank you for the feedback on the study.
The study is fairly simple, I admit. We chose Eminem because of the controversy explicitly about him, and that song, Kill You, because it represented the most extreme version of the criticism. We chose Sabotage because it was a great control group for rap. The rappers in both conditions were thus white and males, and the beat was rated equally aggressive, but the lyrics in one were devoid of misogyny. Yes, different people can agree (or not) about whether the Beastie Boys were rappers, but for our study we assume most people categorize them as rappers as opposed to some other genre of music. And, empirically, the results appear to reflect this presumed categorization.
In future studies, I would want to explore the sex and race of the rappers and within rap I would want to explore the different sub-types: hip-hop, old-school rap, top-40, conscious rap, etc. We just can’t do everything in one study, so we made some trade-offs.
The larger point is one that is broadly misunderstood. We say nothing about causality regarding rap=sexism, even though the data are experimental. Critics of rap, however, are saying that we show rap causes sexism. We are clearly saying we have no evidence for this. Our data show that exposure to it elicits greater self-reported sexism, but sexism predates rap, and other variables are at play. To assume, like the “hypodermic needle hypothesis,” about media exposure to propaganda that music simply “injects” its message and recipients simply accept it is just not tenable. Instead, it makes more sense to interpret these results as reflecting the spontaneous activation of how rap is categorized and stored in memory, at least for most people in this age group.
I like the suggeston that mood/emotion is activated, and I will consider that if I can follow up on this study. Anger, however, is not inherently correlated with sexism, so I'm not sure why sexism increases, for some, after exposure to misogynistic rap.
Posted by: Mike Cobb | March 3, 2008 09:21 PM
I'd be curious to see how people rate when they listen to rappers using misogynistic (or racial) terms as a satirical tool in anti-misogynisitc (or racial) songs. Do people hear the words or the message?
Posted by: jps | March 3, 2008 10:25 PM
Did you use difference-of-means tests?
Posted by: You Know Who | March 5, 2008 03:15 PM