Attitudes on Minorities in Conflict : Race relations: Survey indicates that although white Americans’ support for integration has grown, many still hold negative stereotypes of others.

White Americans are more supportive than ever of efforts to improve racial integration, yet many continue to hold “widespread negative images” of blacks, Latinos, Asians and other ethnic minorities, according to a national survey released Tuesday.

The poll by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago also found that every ethnic group questioned rated itself as better than any other group. There was only one exception: Non-Jewish whites ranked Jews higher than themselves in every category except patriotism.

Researchers said that the findings of its nationwide survey of 1,400 households contradict an oft-expressed opinion that America has rid itself of race-based prejudices.

“The belief that Americans are approaching a color and creed-blind society is easily disabused” by the study, said Tom W. Smith, senior study director for the center.

“Many whites believe blacks and other minorities are more violence-prone, less hard-working, less intelligent, less likely to be self-supporting and less patriotic than whites,” the study showed.

Although the researchers questioned various ethnic groups about their attitudes toward other groups, they studied in depth and made available only the responses of whites.

Their data shows that whites ranked blacks and Latinos far below themselves in all measures used in the study. Whites ranked Asian-Americans somewhat higher, but not as highly as themselves.

Lawrence Bobo, the UCLA sociologist who chaired the committee that designed the study’s questions, said he found it “ironic and unexpected” that large numbers of whites held negative stereotypes of minority groups.

“While certain attitudes that were fairly widespread during the nation’s Jim Crow era have virtually disappeared, the negative images have not disappeared,” he said. “It tells us we haven’t made enough progress.”

Yet at the same time, “two contradictory racial attitudes coexist among white Americans,” the report said. It noted that “between 1970 and 1990, white support for school busing rose from 14% to 29% and white disapproval of laws prohibiting interracial marriage rose from 48% to 77%.”

Smith said that he was unable to explain the contradiction but he and other experts said it indicates that, while people believe they should support policies which would make America more fair, they have not yet changed their underlying prejudices and attitudes.

David Bositis, senior research associate at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a Washington think tank, said the study offers a “reflection of the still relatively limited amount of integration in American society.”

“The reason people have stereotypical perceptions is because they don’t spend very much time in any genuine actions with other types of people,” he said. “Usually what happens when people spend quality time with other people, they start thinking that people are more like themselves than different.”

The study’s findings are significant because they “tend to confirm many (minority) people’s suspicions that stereotyping continues to limit their life chances,” Bobo said. “It also speaks to a type of resentment out there in America that’s going to be problematic in the years to come.”

The practical impact of such stereotyping is immediate and strong, experts said.

Thomas Boston, an associate professor of economics at Georgia Tech, said that his studies in Atlanta have demonstrated that stereotypical and prejudicial attitudes by white business executives prevent minority businesses from winning private contracts.

In his study for the city of Atlanta, Boston said that he surveyed and interviewed more than 100 business leaders, professional association officers and minority entrepreneurs in the Georgia capital. He found that negative attitudes about the quality of black businesses were “far out of proportion” with reality.

“One of the most prominent features that we encountered in these interviews was the stereotyping of capabilities of minorities and then using that as an excuse for not using them as subcontractors,” he said.

The National Opinion Research study, part of an annual General Social Survey, asked respondents to rank the personality and behavioral traits of whites, blacks, Asian-Americans, Latinos, Jews and white Southerners. The six questions were intended to allow respondents to rate the various groups along a seven-point scale.

One question, for example, sought to divine attitudes toward the minority groups’ “work ethic.” It asked respondents to place the various groups along a continuum based on whether the respondent believed that the group prefered “to be self-supporting” or “to live off welfare.”

Other survey questions sought attitudes on wealth, violence, intelligence, dependency and patriotism. Researchers compared all the responses and developed a score for each group based on how whites view minority groups compared with their opinions of other whites.

The survey found that among whites 78% thought blacks more likely to prefer living on welfare and 74% thought Latinos more likely to prefer welfare, 62% thought blacks less likely to be hard-working, 56% thought blacks more violence-prone, 53% thought blacks less intelligent and 51% thought blacks less patriotic. It also found that 56% thought Latinos more likely to be lazy, 50% thought Latinos more likely to be violence-prone, 55% thought Latinos less likely to be intelligent and 61% thought them to be less patriotic.

Researchers did not focus on how minorities viewed whites because the sample of most nonwhite groups was too small to be statistically reliable.