Look Black in anger: The role of implicit prejudice in the categorization and perceived emotional intensity of racially ambiguous faces

Research has demonstrated that individuals high in implicit prejudice are more likely to classify a racially ambiguous angry face as Black compared to individuals low in implicit prejudice [Hugenberg, K., & Bodenhausen, G. V. (2004). Ambiguity in social categorization. Psychological Science, 15, 342-345]. The current study sought to replicate and extend this finding by examining whether the same expression of anger on a racially ambiguous face is perceived to be differentially intense when the face is judged to be Black or White. White participants viewed racially ambiguous, White, and Black faces displaying angry, neutral, or happy emotions. Participants’ task was to identify the race, emotion, and intensity of emotion display. The results revealed that participants high in implicit prejudice reported significantly more of the racially ambiguous angry faces as Black compared to participants low in implicit prejudice. Further, participants high in implicit prejudice reported the intensity of the racially ambiguous angry emotion as greater when the same face had been categorized as Black compared to White. The results suggest that implicit prejudice is not only associated with the racial categorization of an ambiguous face but also the perceived intensity of the emotion displayed.     

Social power increases implicit prejudice

The effects of power on implicit and explicit attitudes towards racial groups were examined. In Study 1, participants who had power showed a stronger facilitation of positive words after exposure to White faces, and negative words after exposure to Black faces, compared to participants who did not have power. In Study 2, powerful participants, compared to controls and powerless participants, showed more positive affective responses to Chinese pictographs that followed White compared to Black faces. Power did, however, not affect explicit racial attitudes. In Study 3, powerful participants showed greater racial prejudice toward Arabs in an Implicit Association Test than did powerless participants. This effect was driven by the power of the perceiver rather than the power of the target. Implications of these findings are discussed.     

Beyond the double-jeopardy hypothesis: Assessing emotion on the faces of multiply-categorizable targets of prejudice

Prior research has shown that race influences perceptions of facial expressions, with hostility detected earlier on young male Black than White faces. This study examined whether the interplay of race and age would moderate perceptions of hostility by having participants evaluate facial expressions of multiply-categorizable targets. Using a facial emotion change-detection task, we assessed evaluations of onset/offset of anger and happiness on faces of young and old Black and White men. Significant age by race interactions were observed: while participants perceived anger as lasting longer and appearing sooner on old compared to young White faces, this relationship was reversed for Black faces, with participants perceiving anger lasting longer and appearing sooner on young compared to old Black faces. Similar results were found for perceived happiness. These results suggest that perception during cross-categorization may be more complex than the simple additive function proposed by the double-jeopardy hypothesis, such that co-activation of other stereotypes may sometimes confer a protective benefit against bias.     

The face of chauvinism: How prejudice expectations shape perceptions of facial affect

Are individuals who chronically expect to be treated prejudicially biased toward perceiving rejecting emotions in the faces of out-group others? In two studies, participants watched a series of computer-generated movies showing animated faces morphing from expressions of rejection (i.e., contempt and anger) to acceptance, and indicated when the initial expression of rejection changed. We also assessed stigma consciousness. Study 1 tested the connection between gender-based stigma consciousness and perceptions of contempt in male vs. female faces among female participants. Study 2 examined this connection for both men and women and for perceptions of contempt as well as anger. Results show that prejudice expectations lead individuals to interpret out-group faces as more rejecting than in-group faces, but only for female perceivers, and not for males. Further, our results suggest that prejudice expectations affect perceptions of contempt, but not anger. These results are discussed in relation to intergroup relations and emotion.     

Functional projection: how fundamental social motives can bias interpersonal perception

Results from 2 experimental studies suggest that self-protection and mate-search goals lead to the perception of functionally relevant emotional expressions in goal-relevant social targets. Activating a self-protection goal led participants to perceive greater anger in Black male faces (Study 1) and Arab faces (Study 2), both out-groups heuristically associated with physical threat. In Study 2, participants' level of implicit Arab-threat associations moderated this bias. Activating a mate-search goal led male, but not female, participants to perceive more sexual arousal in attractive opposite-sex targets (Study 1). Activating these goals did not influence perceptions of goal-irrelevant targets. Additionally, participants with chronic self-protective and mate-search goals exhibited similar biases. Findings are consistent with a functionalist, motivation-based account of interpersonal perception.     

Implicit and explicit ethnocentrism: revisiting the ideologies of prejudice

Two studies investigated relationships among individual differences in implicit and explicit prejudice, right-wing ideology, and rigidity in thinking. The first study examined these relationships focusing on White Americans' prejudice toward Black Americans. The second study provided the first test of implicit ethnocentrism and its relationship to explicit ethnocentrism by studying the relationship between attitudes toward five social groups. Factor analyses found support for both implicit and explicit ethnocentrism. In both studies, mean explicit attitudes toward out groups were positive, whereas implicit attitudes were negative, suggesting that implicit and explicit prejudices are distinct; however, in both studies, implicit and explicit attitudes were related (r = .37, .47). Latent variable modeling indicates a simple structure within this ethnocentric system, with variables organized in order of specificity. These results lead to the conclusion that (a) implicit ethnocentrism exists and (b) it is related to and distinct from explicit ethnocentrism.     

A two-dimensional model that employs explicit and implicit attitudes to characterize prejudice

In the authors' 2-dimensional model of prejudice, explicit and implicit attitudes are used to create 4 profiles: truly low prejudiced (TLP: double lows), aversive racists (AR: low explicit modern racism/high implicit prejudice), principled conservatives (PC: high explicit modern racism/low implicit prejudice), and modern racists (MR: double highs). Students completed an Asian Modern Racism Scale and an Asian/White Implicit Association Test. The authors compared the 4 groups' prejudice-related ideologies (i.e., egalitarianism/humanism and social conservatism) and economic/political conservatism (Study 1, N=132). The authors also tested whether MR but not PC (Study 2, N=65) and AR but not TLP (Study 3, N=143) are more likely to negatively evaluate an Asian target when attributional ambiguity is high (vs. low). In support of the model, TLP did not hold prejudice-related ideologies and did not discriminate; AR were low in conservatism and demonstrated the attributional-ambiguity effect; PC did not strongly endorse prejudice-related ideologies and did not discriminate; MR strongly endorsed prejudice-related ideologies, were conservative, and demonstrated the attributional-ambiguity effect. The authors discuss implications for operationalizing and understanding the nature of prejudice.     

Looking at others through implicitly or explicitly prejudiced eyes

It is well known that we utilize internalized representations (or schemas) to direct our eyes when exploring visual stimuli. Interestingly, our schemas for human faces are known to reflect systematic differences that are consistent with one's level of racial prejudice. However, whether one's level or type of racial prejudice can differentially regulate how we visually explore faces that are the target of prejudice is currently unknown. Here, White participants varying in their level of implicit or explicit prejudice viewed Black faces and White faces (with the latter serving as a control) while having their gaze behaviour recorded with an eye-tracker. The results show that, regardless of prejudice type (i.e., implicit or explicit), participants high in racial prejudice examine faces differently than those low in racial prejudice. Specifically, individuals high in explicit racial prejudice were more likely to fixate on the mouth region of Black faces when compared to individuals low in explicit prejudice, and exhibited less consistency in their scanning of faces irrespective of race. On the other hand, individuals high in implicit racial prejudice tended to focus on the region between the eyes, regardless of face race. It therefore seems that racial prejudice guides target-race specific patterns of looking behaviour, and may also contribute to general patterns of looking behaviour when visually exploring human faces.     

Specific emotions as mediators of the effect of intergroup contact on prejudice: findings across multiple participant and target groups

Emotions are increasingly being recognised as important aspects of prejudice and intergroup behaviour. Specifically, emotional mediators play a key role in the process by which intergroup contact reduces prejudice towards outgroups. However, which particular emotions are most important for prejudice reduction, as well as the consistency and generality of emotion–prejudice relations across different in-group–out-group relations, remain uncertain. To address these issues, in Study 1 we examined six distinct positive and negative emotions as mediators of the contact–prejudice relations using representative samples of U.S. White, Black, and Asian American respondents (N?=?639). Admiration and anger (but not other emotions) were significant mediators of the effects of previous contact on prejudice, consistently across different perceiver and target ethnic groups. Study 2 examined the same relations with student participants and gay men as the out-group. Admiration and disgust mediated the effect of past contact on attitude. The findings confirm that not only negative emotions (anger or disgust, based on the specific types of threat perceived to be posed by an out-group), but also positive, status- and esteem-related emotions (admiration) mediate effects of contact on prejudice, robustly across several different respondent and target groups.     

Virtual prejudice

According to recent theorizing in social psychology, social behavior is controlled not only by reflective, but also by impulsive systems. The latter are based on associative links that may influence behavior without intent. The current study examined how prejudiced implicit associations affect physiological and automatic behavioral responses. Our native Dutch participants were immersed in a virtual environment in which they encountered virtual persons (avatars) with either White or Moroccan facial features. In line with our predictions, participants maintained more distance and showed an increase in skin conductance level when approaching Moroccan avatars as opposed to White avatars. Participants’ implicit negative associations with Moroccans moderated both effects. Moreover, evidence was found that the relation between implicit prejudice and distance effects was fully mediated by skin conductance level effects. These data demonstrate how prejudiced implicit associations may unintentionally lead to impulsive discriminatory responses.     

Subliminal exposure to faces and racial attitudes: Exposure to Whites makes Whites like Blacks less

Despite recent social and political advances, most interracial contact is still superficial in nature, and White individuals interact mainly with other Whites. Based on recent mere exposure research, we propose that repeated exposure to Whites may actually increase prejudice. In a series of experiments, White participants were subliminally exposed to White faces or nothing (control) and then completed various explicit and implicit measures of racial attitudes. Exposure to White faces consistently led to more prejudice by making attitudes toward Blacks more negative, rather than by making attitudes toward Whites more positive. A final experiment demonstrated that the pattern of increased prejudice following exposure to Whites was moderated by the strength of participants’ attitudes toward Whites. Only when White attitudes were strong did Black attitudes became more negative after exposure to White faces.     

Social influence effects on automatic racial prejudice.

Although most research on the control of automatic prejudice has focused on the efficacy of deliberate attempts to suppress or correct for stereotyping, the reported experiments tested the hypothesis that automatic racial prejudice is subject to common social influence. In experiments involving actual interethnic contact, both tacit and expressed social influence reduced the expression of automatic prejudice, as assessed by two different measures of automatic attitudes. Moreover, the automatic social tuning effect depended on participant ethnicity. European Americans (but not Asian Americans) exhibited less automatic prejudice in the presence of a Black experimenter than a White experimenter (Experiments 2 and 4), although both groups exhibited reduced automatic prejudice when instructed to avoid prejudice (Experiment 3). Results are consistent with shared reality theory, which postulates that social regulation is central to social cognition.     

Category and stereotype activation revisited

In Study 1 (N= 230), we found that the participants' explicit prejudice was not related to their knowledge of cultural stereotypes of immigrants in Sweden, and that they associated the social category immigrants with the same national/ethnic categories. In Study 2 (N= 88), employing the category and stereotype words obtained in Study 1 as primes, we examined whether participants with varying degrees of explicit prejudice differed in their automatic stereotyping and implicit prejudice when primed with category or stereotypical words. In accord with our hypothesis, and contrary to previous findings, the results showed that people's explicit prejudice did not affect their automatic stereotyping and implicit prejudice, neither in the category nor stereotype priming condition. Study 3 (N= 62), employing category priming using facial photographs of Swedes and immigrants as primes, showed that participants' implicit prejudice was not moderated by their explicit prejudice. The outcome is discussed in relation to the distinction between category and stereotype priming and in terms of the associative strength between a social category and its related stereotypes.     

Intergroup time bias and racialized social relations

Within the framework of intergroup relations, the authors analyzed the time people spent evaluating ingroup and outgroup members. They hypothesized that White participants take longer to evaluate White targets than Black targets. In four experiments, White participants were slower to form impressions of White than of Black people; that is, they showed an intergroup time bias (ITB). In Study 1 (N = 60), the ITB correlated with implicit prejudice and homogeneity. Study 2 (N = 60) showed that the ITB was independent of the type of trait in question (nonstereotypical vs. stereotypical). Study 3 (N = 100) demonstrated that ITB correlates with racism measured 3 months beforehand, is independent of motivation to control prejudice, and is not an epiphenomenon of homogeneity. In Study 4 (N = 40) participants not only showed the ITB in a racialized social context but also displayed it following a minimal group manipulation.     

Implicit motivation to control prejudice

This research examines whether spontaneous, unintentional discriminatory behavior can be moderated by an implicit (nonconscious) motivation to control prejudice. We operationalize implicit motivation to control prejudice (IMCP) in terms of an implicit negative attitude toward prejudice (NAP) and an implicit belief that oneself is prejudiced (BOP). In the present experiment, an implicit stereotypic association of Blacks (vs. Whites) with weapons was positively correlated with the tendency to “shoot” armed Black men faster than armed White men (the “Shooter Bias”) in a computer simulation. However, participants relatively high in implicit negative attitude toward prejudice showed no relation between the race-weapons stereotype and the shooter bias. Implicit belief that oneself is prejudiced had no direct effect on this relation, but the interaction of NAP and BOP did. Participants who had a strong association between self and prejudice (high BOP) but a weak association between prejudice and bad (low NAP) showed the strongest relation between the implicit race-weapons stereotype and the Shooter Bias, suggesting that these individuals freely employed their stereotypes in their behavior.     

Ambiguity in social categorization: The role of prejudice and facial affect in race categorization

Abstract— Two studies tested the hypothesis that perceivers' prejudice and targets' facial expressions bias race categorization in stereotypic directions. Specifically, we hypothesized that racial prejudice would be more strongly associated with a tendency to categorize hostile (but not happy) racially ambiguous faces as African American. We obtained support for this hypothesis using both a speeded dichotomous categorization task (Studies 1 and 2) and a rating-scale task (Study 2). Implicit prejudice (but not explicit prejudice) was related to increased sensitivity to the targets' facial expressions, regardless of whether prejudice was measured after (Study 1) or before (Study 2) the race categorizations were made.     

Gender differences in implicit prejudice

In three experiments (n=131), we examined gender differences in implicit (and explicit) racial prejudice employing priming of immigrant and Swedish facial photographs without attention or without awareness. Implicit prejudice was defined as the degree of negativity expressed toward a person described in a subsequent ambiguous story in an impression formation task. We found, contrary to our hypothesis, that women displayed systematically higher implicit prejudice than men in all three experiments, although men scored higher on explicit prejudice than women. The results are discussed against the background of related prejudice research, the dissociation of implicit and explicit prejudice, and gender differences in cognitive functioning, especially in the processing of pictorial stimuli.     

Social antecedents of children's implicit prejudice: Direct contact,extended contact,explicit and implicit teachers' prejudice

Recent research has shown that children display implicit prejudice at least by age six (Baron & Banaji, 2006). In the present study, we investigated some potential antecedents of children's implicit intergroup attitudes: direct contact, extended contact, explicit and implicit racial attitudes of children's favourite teacher. Participants were Italian elementary school students. Results showed that, unexpectedly, direct contact increased negative implicit attitudes toward immigrants; extended contact reduced implicit prejudice only among those with less direct contact experiences. In addition, teachers' implicit (but not explicit) prejudice predicted children's implicit prejudice. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed, together with the importance of the social environment in the formation of children's implicit intergroup attitudes.     

On the malleability of automatic attitudes: combating automatic prejudice with images of admired and disliked individuals.

Two experiments examined whether exposure to pictures of admired and disliked exemplars can reduce automatic preference for White over Black Americans and younger over older people. In Experiment 1, participants were exposed to either admired Black and disliked White individuals, disliked Black and admired White individuals, or nonracial exemplars. Immediately after exemplar exposure and 24 hr later, they completed an Implicit Association Test that assessed automatic racial attitudes and 2 explicit attitude measures. Results revealed that exposure to admired Black and disliked White exemplars significantly weakened automatic pro-White attitudes for 24 hr beyond the treatment but did not affect explicit racial attitudes. Experiment 2 provided a replication using automatic age-related attitudes. Together, these studies provide a strategy that attempts to change the social context and, through it, to reduce automatic prejudice and preference.     

Framing matters: contextual influences on interracial interaction outcomes

Previous studies indicate that interracial interactions frequently have negative outcomes but have typically focused on social contexts. The current studies examined the effect of manipulating interaction context. In Study 1, Black and White participants worked together with instructions that created either a social focus or a task focus. With a task focus, interracial pairs were more consistently synchronized, Black participants showed less executive function depletion, and White participants generally showed reduced implicit bias. Follow-up studies suggested that prejudice concerns help explain these findings: White participants reported fewer concerns about appearing prejudiced when they imagined an interracial interaction with a task focus rather than a social focus (Study 2a), and Black participants reported less vigilance against prejudice in an imagined interracial interaction with a task focus rather than a social focus (Study 2b). Taken together, these studies illustrate the importance of interaction context for the experiences of both Blacks and Whites.