One validity concern is the possibility of social desirability bias in the survey experiment. Belief in essential racial difference was not related to explicit racism, as it was predicted to be, although it was related to implicit racism and social distance from black people. One possible explanation for this null association is that the content of the explicit racism items—with their more general, less personal focus on the extent to which racism is a problem in society at large—is further removed from belief in essential racial differences than are the two other racism measures, which entail immediate reactions to black and white faces and preferences regarding personal closeness with black people. A second possibility is that the explicit racism questions too obviously measure racial bias and social desirability bias thus renders them a poor measure. Due to concerns about social desirability bias, studies have largely replaced direct measures of racial prejudice (e.g., opposition to racial integration and endorsement of racial stereotypes) with more indirect questions about prejudice as well as implicit measures of racial bias. Our measure of explicit racism,
