Heat map reveals Europe's closet racism

A computer test that is said to be cheat-proof exposes a heat map of closet racism right across Europe, with Italy, Portugal and some of the former Soviet states faring even worse than the UK.

Only the Balkan countries, in particular Serbia, emerge as tolerant, though none is completely free of racial stereotyping, the figures from Sheffield University disclose.

More than 288,000 white Europeans contributed to the 13-year survey, which shows that people are slower to associate photographs of black people with positive words such as “nice”, and quicker to associate them with negative descriptions.

Dr Tom Stafford, a senior lecturer in psychology at Sheffield University, said: “Racism is not the sort of thing anyone would admit to in polite company. You can’t find out just by asking people because they know what the right answer is.

“But in this test it is very difficult to deliberately control your score. It’s hard to hide your instinctive reaction.”

The survey, designed at Harvard University, measures the speed at which people can compartmentalise “positive” and “negative” words such as “war” and “daffodil” into black and white areas. It reveals the Czech Republic to have the highest “implicit racial bias” in Europe, followed by Lithuania, Belarus and the Ukraine.

The researchers say: “Many people, including those who sincerely hold non-racist or even anti-racist beliefs, demonstrate positive implicit bias on the test.”

Dr Stafford added: “The results give detail to what we already expected - that across Europe racial attitudes are not neutral. They do show Britain as part of a liberal, northern Europe.”

But he added that since the test had been taken by mostly “younger, more cosmopolitan” people, the figures were likely to underplay the true extent of racism in each country.

He said they also did not reflect attitudes towards Muslims and other ethnic groups, nor evidence of xenophobia.

In the US, a similar pattern of racism is shown, with figures varying widely between regions. In the southern states, with higher African-American populations, the levels of “implicit bias” are much higher than those in the north-west, which have mostly white residents.

The Sheffield researchers now plan to assess whether attitudes are getting more or less liberal over time.