Controlling for age, gender, education, and race, we assessed the relationship between both implicit and explicit racism and belief in essential racial differences among participants who were assigned the Backdoor Vignette. As the backdoor hypothesis would suggest, the relationship was small and non-significant for both bias measures (coefficient = .172 for implicit racism; coefficient = −.065 for explicit racism). In contrast to the Backdoor Vignette, the social relevance of the Race-as-Social-Construction and Race-as-Genetic-Reality Vignettes should be more obvious to participants, and these vignettes could possibly bring participants’ preexisting racial attitudes into play. If so, racial bias might be associated with belief in essential racial differences for participants assigned to the two comparison vignettes. Consistent with this possibility, implicit racism was positively and significantly related to belief in racial difference for both comparison vignettes (coefficient = .465 and p < .05 for Social Construction; coefficient = .460 and p < .01 for Genetic Reality). However, the relationship between explicit racism and belief in essential racial differences was small and nonsignificant for both comparison vignettes (coefficient = .031 for Social Construction; coefficient
