March 2, 2004
Subconscious Bias Skews Perceptions
EVANSTON, Ill.
--- Say you’re a white European American
who truly believes that a person should not be judged by the color
of his or her skin.
Despite that egalitarian attitude, according to new Northwestern
University research, subconscious -- or implicit -- bias can emerge
subtly but quickly from its hiding places in the psyche and cause
even well-meaning whites to look at identical facial expressions
of African Americans and European Americans and see greater hostility
in the African American faces.
Or take whites’ perceptions
of racially ambiguous faces that combine both African American
and European American features.
If the expression on the racially ambiguous face is hostile, European
Americans are more likely to identify it as African American.
The unusual research, by Kurt Hugenberg, assistant professor,
Miami University, and Galen Bodenhausen, professor of psychology
at Northwestern, strongly suggests implicit bias distorts perception
of facial cues so important to effective communication and perpetuates
stereotypes. A self-fulfilling prophecy may be among the most troubling
consequences.
“If stereotypes color something as basic as face perception,
then the downstream consequences may be considerable,” said
Bodenhausen. “Perceived hostility will at best promote avoidance
-- or worse, may foster reciprocation.”
Further research is needed to determine how perceptual bias in
the first moments of contact might play themselves out over the
course of social interaction, but current results suggest that
negative dynamics will follow.
While implicit
bias has been the focus of a variety of research, Bodenhausen’s
work is rare in that it uses changing computer -generated facial
expressions to tease out how deeply-rooted prejudice
distorts perceptions. Most experiments on face perception use still
photographs as stimuli, despite the dynamic nature of facial displays
in real-life interactions.
The two companion
studies are titled “Facing Prejudice:
Implicit Prejudice and the Perception of a Facial Threat” (Psychological
Science, 2003) and “Ambiguity in Social Categorization: the
Role of Prejudice and Facial Affect in Race Categorization” (Psychological
Science, in press).
In the first experiment, when identical facial expressions of
African Americans and European Americans changed from hostile to
positive expressions, white viewers often perceived the hostility
to linger longer in black faces.
The experiment
included 24 European Americans who observed four movies with
computer-based faces of both whites and African Americans
that morphed from unambiguous hostility to unambiguous happiness.
The target’s expression was ambiguous, somewhere between
hostile and friendly, for a substantial period of time in each
movie; and black and white faces were matched precisely for both
facial structure and expression. Participants, who watched the
movies on computers, were instructed to press the space bar when
the target face no longer expressed its initial emotion.
They were
then presented with a “feeling thermometer” about
the five different social groups, including Caucasians and African
Americans. The thermometer indicated how warmly or coldly they
felt about each group on a one –to-100 score, with higher
responses indicating warmth.
Finally, participants took an implicit association test, a simple
word categorization test designed to measure implicit racial bias.
Although explicit attitudes toward blacks did not relate to face
perception, individuals who tested as high in implicit bias, compared
to those who measured low, saw hostility as lingering longer and
appearing more quickly in the faces of African Americans.
Twenty-four European Americans also participated in the experiment
that is in press, on ambiguity in social categorization. Fifteen
computer-generated faces were morphed to contain racially ambiguous
facial structures, skin tone and hairstyles. Each face was further
manipulated to create two expressions, one clearly happy and the
other clearly hostile. This time the task was to identify the race
of the racially ambiguous faces. A feeling thermometer and the
word categorization test also were used in these experiments to
measure prejudice.
“When faces were seen to display relatively hostile expressions,
individuals high in implicit prejudice tended to categorize them
as African American,” said Bodenhausen.
The relationship between prejudice and categorization was not
evident for happy faces. Thus, the results strongly suggest that
in cases of uncertain categorization, the stereotypical biases
of individuals relatively high in implicit prejudice take hold
and drive categorization.
“The susceptibility of biracial individuals to societal
prejudice depends on whether or not they are categorized as members
of a culturally stigmatized group,” said Bodenhausen.
“Of
course, angry displays are likely to result in problematic social
interactions in general, but biracial individuals may be
saddled with an additional burden when dormant negative racial
stereotypes are activated.”
Both experiments
show how stereotypes can color our early and most immediate perceptions
of other people, he said. “We
are constructing the meaning of other people’s behavior on
the basis of our attitudes and assigning stereotypical characteristics
readily.” |