Racial Resentment Scale
Also known as: Racial Resentment Battery, Kinder-Sanders Racial Resentment Measure, New Racism Scale, Racial Resentment Index
The Racial Resentment Scale, developed by Donald Kinder and Lynn Sanders in Divided by Color (1996), measures a modern, symbolic form of racial prejudice in which anti-Black affect is fused with the traditional American value of individualism. Rather than endorsing biological inferiority, racially resentful respondents express the belief that Black Americans violate norms of self-reliance and hard work and make illegitimate demands for special treatment. The standard battery of four agree-disagree items has become the dominant survey measure of racial attitudes in American political science and a powerful predictor of opinion on welfare, affirmative action, and racialized candidate evaluation.
Key highlights
- Provides a short, highly reliable four-item battery that travels easily across decades of U.S. survey data.
- Captures a socially acceptable, modern form of prejudice that overt racism items miss.
- Predicts racialized policy opinion and candidate evaluation strongly, often beyond ideology and partisanship.
- Anchors a large cumulative literature, enabling comparison and replication across studies.
Intuition
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How it works
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When to use it
Use the Racial Resentment Scale when you need a compact, well-validated survey measure of contemporary anti-Black attitudes to explain opinion on racialized policies, candidate evaluation, or vote choice in the United States. It is appropriate in general-population surveys where overt prejudice items would draw social-desirability bias, and it integrates readily into regression models of policy attitudes. It is less appropriate outside the U.S. racial context, for measuring attitudes toward other groups (use a tailored prejudice scale instead), or when the research question requires distinguishing principled conservatism from prejudice, since the scale's entanglement of race and individualism is exactly what that debate contests. Measurement-equivalence checks are advisable when comparing across racial groups.
Strengths & limitations
- Provides a short, highly reliable four-item battery that travels easily across decades of U.S. survey data.
- Captures a socially acceptable, modern form of prejudice that overt racism items miss.
- Predicts racialized policy opinion and candidate evaluation strongly, often beyond ideology and partisanship.
- Anchors a large cumulative literature, enabling comparison and replication across studies.
- Critics argue the items conflate racial prejudice with principled individualism, making interpretation contested.
- Validity and measurement equivalence across racial groups and over time are questioned.
- Designed for the U.S. Black-white context and not portable to other groups or countries without rewriting.
- As a self-report attitude measure it cannot capture implicit or behaviorally expressed prejudice.
Common pitfalls
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Applications
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Frequently asked
Does the Racial Resentment Scale measure prejudice or just conservatism?
This is the central debate. Kinder and Sanders intend it to capture a modern prejudice in which anti-Black affect is expressed through individualist language. Critics counter that the items invoke the work ethic, an unobjectionable value, so high scores may reflect principled conservatism rather than racial animus. The construct deliberately fuses race and individualism, which makes the two hard to disentangle by design. Most users treat it as a measure of racialized attitudes while acknowledging that its individualism content keeps interpretation contested.
Why include reverse-keyed items?
Two of the four items are worded so that agreement signals sympathy rather than resentment. Mixing item direction reduces acquiescence bias, the tendency of some respondents to agree regardless of content. Dropping the reverse-keyed items would inflate apparent resentment and undermine the balance Kinder and Sanders built into the battery, so the full four-item set should be retained and recoded to a common direction before scaling.
Can the scale be used outside the United States or for other groups?
Not directly. The items are written around the specific history of Black-white relations in the United States, invoking slavery, discrimination, and the American work ethic. Applying them to other countries or to attitudes toward other groups strips them of meaning. Researchers studying prejudice elsewhere should use a construct and wording tailored to that context, such as subtle-prejudice or anti-immigrant scales, rather than transplanting racial resentment.
Sources
- 1.Kinder, D. R., & Sanders, L. M. (1996). Divided by Color: Racial Politics and Democratic Ideals. University of Chicago Press.ISBN 9780226435749
- 2.Tesler, M. (2015). The Conditions Ripe for Racial Spillover Effects. Political Psychology, 36(S1), 101-117.
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Cite this page
ScholarGate. (2026, June 23). Racial Resentment Scale. ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/political-psychology/racial-resentment-scale