In this paper, we adopt an indirect questioning methodology to measure attitudes toward the use of race as a criterion for admission in brazilian higher education institutions. We hypothesize that attitudes toward affirmative action policies like racial quotas cannot be measured by conventional survey questions because non-eligible students—white students—may fear to appear prejudiced by showing opposition to them. This survey effect is well-known as the social desirability effect. Thus we adopt a list experiment to measure students’ attitudes toward the race-based quota admission system. This methodology provides respondents with a certain degree of privacy and thus allows to better measure sincere attitudes toward that object. As expected, the results show that non-eligible students tend to under-report their opposition to racial quotas in university admissions. But, more interestingly, the findings show that quota eligible non-white students tend, for their part, to under-report their approval of the use of race in university admissions. Specifically, eligible students, when provided privacy in their responses, almost unanimously approve of the racial quota system, but publicly voice a much more timid approval of it. We label this survey effect as the inhibition survey effect.