Health & Fitness - Doctors may have subconscious racial bias

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Doctors may have subconscious racial bias

SEATTLE (UPI) -- A sophisticated cognitive test suggests that U.S. physicians -- like society at large -- have subconscious racial attitudes and stereotypes, researchers say.

The study, published in the journal Medical Care, suggests that pediatricians have less "implicit race bias" than physicians in other specialties and the general public and that there was no relationship between subconscious bias and quality of care.

"Further research is needed to explore whether physician implicit attitudes and stereotypes about race predict quality of care," Janice A. Sabin and colleagues of University of Washington said in a statement.

Ninety-five pediatricians took an Internet survey called the Race Attitude Implicit Association that measures subconscious attitudes and stereotypes based on how quickly the user makes connections between race and certain "good" versus "bad" concepts. Previous research in more than 1 million Internet users suggest that most people have some degree of "implicit preference" for whites relative to blacks -- despite a lack of conscious, or explicit, bias or prejudice.

The pediatricians expressed an explicit attitude in favor of African-Americans, however, in addition to their implicit preference for whites, they held a subconscious bias that white patients would be more compliant with medical treatment, the researchers said.

Copyright 2008 by United Press International

This news arrived on: 07/21/2008

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