"Cognitive Costs of Exposure to Racial Prejudice"

"The cognitive impact of exposure to ambiguous versus blatant cues to prejudice depended on subjects’ racial group. Black subjects experienced the greatest impairment when they saw ambiguous evidence of prejudice, whereas White subjects experienced the greatest impairment when they saw blatant evidence of prejudice. Given the often ambiguous nature of contemporary expressions of prejudice, these results have important implications for the performance of ethnic minorities across many domains...

For optimal social functioning, people must accurately understand others’ motivations. Previous research suggests that they will expend attention and effort to achieve this goal. Indeed, uncertainty about the cause of an event triggers diagnostic information seeking—a careful, laborious deployment of attention, designed to render an accurate causal assessment (e.g., Riley, 1998; Weary & Jacobson, 1997). Given that contemporary forms of prejudice are often subtle and ambiguous, targets of prejudice may experience cognitive impairment as they try to determine the cause underlying the negative events they encounter in their lives...
It is important for members of disadvantaged groups to be able to predict the likelihood of discrimination occurring in their immediate social environment, regardless of whether their own group would be the primary target. Uncertainty about others’ prejudice leaves marginalized individuals unable to discern which coping strategies would be most appropriate to the situation...

findings suggest that Whites are relatively insensitive to subtle cues of prejudice, regardless of the race that is targeted."
http://pss.sagepub.com/content/18/9/810.short

Oh wow, I am so glad to have stumbled upon this, the whole paper is super interesting and personally useful. I totally spend a lot of cognitive energy on 'what just happened there?' and 'why am I now so uncomfortable around this person?'. That ambiguity is so, so exhausting. Like, all of the other things I could be thinking about instead - or, like, all of the times I couldn't fall asleep because every confusing thing from the day/week/forever was running around in my head in the darkness.

Probably related: “Why White People Freak Out When They’re Called Out About Race”

FB: Findings that evidence of blatant versus ambiguous racism have different impacts on the ability of study participants of different races to focus on a later task: White people are more impaired by evidence of blatant racism, black people are more impaired by evidence of ambiguous racism.