Rap music found to bring out sexism, not cause it

NEW YORK (Reuters Life!) - Rap music can bring out the sexism in people but it doesn't necessarily cause people to be sexist, according a study of American college students.

Researchers at North Carolina State University set out to look at rap music's effects on sexist attitudes among college students to see if the claims of many critics that rap music caused sexist beliefs were true.

But the researchers who conducted two studies involving 425 students found that the connection between rap and sexism was unlikely to be a direct cause-and-effect.

"We feel it's unlikely that hearing lyrics in a song creates attitudes that did not previously exist," said Michael Cobb, assistant professor of political science, who conducted the study with Bill Boettcher, associate professor of political science.

"Instead, rap music, fairly or unfairly, has become associated with misogyny, and even minimal exposure to it can automatically activate these mental associations and increase their application, at least temporarily."

Their study, titled "Ambivalent Sexism and Misogynistic Rap Music: Does Exposure to Eminem Increase Sexism?," is published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology.

Cobb said the research was based on studies splitting college students into three groups and testing their levels of sexism using a standard set of statements which the students endorsed or rejected.

One was a control group that did not listen to any music.

A second group of students listened to a non-sexist rap song, "Sabotage" by the Beastie Boys, while a third listened to the rap song "Kill You" by Eminem which has overtly sexist lyrics and describes hostility and violence toward women.

As expected, the researchers found that the male students were more sexist than the women in all three groups but, surprisingly, they found that sexist attitudes among respondents also increased after exposure to rap that contained no sexist lyrics.

"Rap music may be associated with sexist attitudes and beliefs, regardless of the actual lyrical content," said Cobb.

"So non-sexist rap can now have sexist implications. This gets back to our hypothesis that we don't think rap music causes sexism, because how can rap that contains non-sexist lyrics cause someone to become sexist?"

Cobb said more research was needed into understanding the relationship between the origins of music and attitudes.

"Priming latent sexism is not the same thing as causing it," he said. "At worst, we could conclude that rap music might exacerbate pre-existing tendencies, but so too can other genres of music and varied forms of entertainment. There is not much evidence in our study to support an argument in favor of censorship."