We have argued that, even if correct, the backdoor-to-eugenics hypothesis may have substantial social significance only if the belief that racial groups differ essentially is related to other aspects of racism. Hypothesis 6 states that belief in essential racial differences will be significantly related to three measures of racism in our dataset—explicit racism, implicit racism, and social distance from black people. This analysis was restricted to non-Hispanic whites (N = 469). Belief in essential racial differences and social distance from blacks were measured after participants read the vignette, so we controlled vignette version in this analysis. Because these analyses are based on observational rather than experimental data and are subject to confounding, we report results with and without sociodemographic controls (gender, age, and educational attainment) to observe the extent to which relationships among attitude variables are explained by sociodemographic factors. The standardized coefficient predicting explicit racism from belief in essential racial differences was nonsignificant both before (−.06) and after (−.11) sociodemographic controls. However, coefficients for implicit racism and social distance were significant with (.15 and .31, respectively) and without (.14
