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A Superhumanization Bias in Whites’ Perceptions of Blacks
Adam Waytz, Kelly Marie Hoffman & Sophie Trawalter
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
The present research provides the first systematic empirical investigation into superhumanization, the attribution of supernatural, extrasensory, and magical mental and physical qualities to humans. Five studies test and support the hypothesis that White Americans superhumanize Black people relative to White people. Studies 1–2b demonstrate this phenomenon at an implicit level, showing that Whites preferentially associate Blacks versus Whites with superhuman versus human words on an implicit association test and on a categorization task. Studies 3–4 demonstrate this phenomenon at an explicit level, showing that Whites preferentially attribute superhuman capacities to Blacks versus Whites, and Study 4 specifically shows that superhumanization of Blacks predicts denial of pain to Black versus White targets. Together, these studies demonstrate a novel and potentially detrimental process through which Whites perceive Blacks.
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A rose by any other name?: The consequences of subtyping “African-Americans” from “Blacks”
Erika Hall, Katherine Phillips & Sarah Townsend
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, January 2015, Pages 183–190
Abstract:
Racial labels often define how social groups are perceived. The current research utilized both archival and experimental methods to explore the consequences of the “Black” vs. “African-American” racial labels on Whites' evaluations of racial minorities. We argue that the racial label Black evokes a mental representation of a person with lower socioeconomic status than the racial label African-American, and that Whites will react more negatively toward Blacks (vs. African-Americans). In Study 1, we show that the stereotype content for Blacks (vs. African-Americans) is lower in status, positivity, competence, and warmth. In Study 2, Whites view a target as lower status when he is identified as Black vs. African-American. In Study 3, we demonstrate that the use of the label Black vs. African-American in a US Newspaper crime report article is associated with a negative emotional tone in that respective article. Finally, in Study 4, we show that Whites view a criminal suspect more negatively when he is identified as Black vs. African-American. The results establish how racial labels can have material consequences for a group.
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Gendered Race Prototypes: Evidence for the non-prototypicality of Asian men and Black women
Joanna Schug, Nicholas Alt & Karl Christoph Klauer
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, January 2015, Pages 121–125
Abstract:
Previous research from the perspective of gendered race theory has demonstrated that stereotypes about race often contain a gendered component, whereby certain racial and ethnic groups are stereotyped as more masculine or feminine. In particular, in North American contexts, Blacks tend to be associated with masculinity, while Asians tend to be associated with femininity. In this paper we present the hypothesis that Asian men and Black women are deemed less prototypical of their overarching racial groups due to the mismatch between their identities and gendered race stereotypes. First, we show evidence demonstrating that Asian men face invisibility at the cognitive level, consistent with previous theory and research related to Black women (Study 1). Second, we present direct evidence that participants are more likely to imagine a man when thinking of a Black individual and less likely to think of a man when imagining an Asian individual, relative to the frequency of Whites (Study 2). Overall, our results support the hypothesis that Asian men and Black women are viewed as less prototypical of their race categories. We discuss implications and future directions for work on intersectionality and gendered race theory.
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Lance Hannon & Robert DeFina
Race and Social Problems, December 2014, Pages 356-364
Abstract:
Over the last decade, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has seen a significant increase in the number of discrimination claims based on skin shade. However, in some ways, substantiating colorism has proven to be more difficult than documenting racism, as skin tone data are rarely collected and few existing skin tone measures have been validated. The present study examines an increasingly popular skin tone scale that includes a professionally designed color guide to enhance rater consistency. Logistic regression analysis of data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and General Social Survey indicates that despite the addition of the color guide, the race of the interviewer matters for the assessment of respondent skin tone. On average, African American respondents with a white interviewer were about 3 times more likely to be classified as dark than those with an African American interviewer. We argue that failing to appropriately account for this race-of-interviewer effect can significantly impact colorism findings.
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Secrets and Misperceptions: The Creation of Self-Fulfilling Illusions
Sarah Cowan
Sociological Science, November 2014, Pages 466-492
Abstract:
This study examines who hears what secrets, comparing two similar secrets-one which is highly stigmatized and one which is less so. Using a unique survey representative of American adults and intake forms from a medical clinic, I document marked differences in who hears these secrets. People who are sympathetic to the stigmatizing secret are more likely to hear of it than those who may react negatively. This is a consequence not just of people selectively disclosing their own secrets but selectively sharing others’ as well. As a result, people in the same social network will be exposed to and influenced by different information about those they know and hence experience that network differently. When people effectively exist in networks tailored by others to not offend then the information they hear tends to be that of which they already approve. Were they to hear secrets they disapprove of then their attitudes might change but they are less likely to hear those secrets. As such, the patterns of secret-hearing contribute to a stasis in public opinion.
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The White Ceiling Heuristic and the Underestimation of Asian-American Income
Chris Martin & John Nezlek
PLoS ONE, September 2014
Abstract:
The belief that ethnic majorities dominate ethnic minorities informs research on intergroup processes. This belief can lead to the social heuristic that the ethnic majority sets an upper limit that minority groups cannot surpass, but this possibility has not received much attention. In three studies of perceived income, we examined how this heuristic, which we term the White ceiling heuristic leads people to inaccurately estimate the income of a minority group that surpasses the majority. We found that Asian Americans, whose median income has surpassed White median income for nearly three decades, are still perceived as making less than Whites, with the least accurate estimations being made by people who strongly believe that Whites are privileged. In contrast, income estimates for other minorities were fairly accurate. Thus, perceptions of minorities are shaped both by stereotype content and a heuristic.
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Do You Really Understand? Achieving Accuracy in Interracial Relationships
Deborah Son Holoien et al.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Accurately perceiving whether interaction partners feel understood is important for developing intimate relationships and maintaining smooth interpersonal exchanges. During interracial interactions, when are Whites and racial minorities likely to accurately perceive how understood cross-race partners feel? We propose that participant race, desire to affiliate, and racial salience moderate accuracy in interracial interactions. Examination of cross-race roommates (Study 1) and interracial interactions with strangers (Study 2) revealed that when race is salient, Whites higher in desire to affiliate with racial minorities failed to accurately perceive the extent to which racial minority partners felt understood. Thus, although the desire to affiliate may appear beneficial, it may interfere with Whites’ ability to accurately perceive how understood racial minorities feel. By contrast, racial minorities higher in desire to affiliate with Whites accurately perceived how understood White partners felt. Furthermore, participants’ overestimation of how well they understood partners correlated negatively with partners’ reports of relationship quality. Collectively, these findings indicate that racial salience and desire to affiliate moderate accurate perceptions of cross-race partners — even in the context of sustained interracial relationships — yielding divergent outcomes for Whites and racial minorities.
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Kevin Kniffin et al.
Leadership Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Physical attractiveness is most commonly presumed to be an exogenous characteristic that influences people's feelings, perceptions, and behavior across myriad types of relationships. We investigate the opposite prediction in which feelings toward other people influence the perceptions of others' attractiveness. Focusing specifically on subordinates' perceptions of leaders of in-groups and out-groups, we examine whether group membership moderates familiarity in relation to ratings of physical attractiveness. Studies 1 and 2 show that subordinates rate the leaders of their in-groups as significantly more physically attractive than comparably familiar out-group leaders. Our findings have relevance for understanding the interactive roles of physical attractiveness within contemporary organizational environments and help to account for variance in interpersonal perceptions on the basis of group membership. In contrast with research traditions that treat physical attractiveness as a static trait, our findings highlight the importance of group membership as a lens for perceiving familiar leaders' physical attractiveness.
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Sexualized Avatars Lead to Women’s Self-Objectification and Acceptance of Rape Myths
Jesse Fox et al.
Psychology of Women Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research has indicated that many video games and virtual worlds are populated by unrealistic, hypersexualized representations of women, but the effects of using these representations remain understudied. Objectification theory suggests that women’s exposure to sexualized media representations leads to self-objectification. Further, we anticipated this process would lead to increases in rape myth acceptance (RMA). Two experiments (Study 1, N = 87; Study 2, N = 81) examined the effects of avatar features on women’s experiences of self-objectification. In both studies, college women exposed to sexualized avatars experienced higher levels of self-objectification after the virtual experience than those exposed to nonsexualized avatars. Furthermore, in Study 2, self-objectification mediated the relationship between controlling a sexualized avatar and subsequent levels of RMA. We discuss the implications of women using sexualized avatars in video games and virtual environments, which may lead to negative attitudes about the self and other women off-line due to heightened self-objectification.
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Sexual objectification pushes women away: The role of decreased likability
Fei Teng et al.
European Journal of Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The present investigation examined the effect of sexual objectification on women's intention to affiliate with men. We predicted that women would perceive an objectifier as less likable following sexual objectification and thus would distance themselves from the perpetrator. Study 1 found that objectification led female participants to perceive their male partner as less likable and to be less willing to affiliate with the partner. Study 2 replicated Study 1 in a concurrent interpersonal interaction and extended these effects to a man having a similar background with the perpetrator. Study 3 showed that power moderated the effect of sexual objectification on women's interaction intention such that only women with equal or low power (as compared to the objectifier) decreased their affiliation intention toward the objectifier, whereas high-power women did not show this effect. Implications of these findings were discussed.
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“I Thought You Were Japanese”: Ethnic Miscategorization and Identity Assertion
Matthew Trujillo, Randi Garcia & Nicole Shelton
Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Across 2 studies we examined how ethnic minorities respond to ethnic miscategorization. Using a 21-day experience sampling procedure (Study 1), we found that ethnic minorities exhibited greater ethnic identity assertion when they had reported being ethnically miscategorized the previous day. Similarly, we found that ethnic minorities who were ethnically miscategorized (vs. not) by a White partner in the laboratory exhibited greater ethnic identity assertion and expressed greater dislike of their partner (Study 2). In both studies, these effects were stronger for individuals whose ethnic identity was central to their self-concept. The implications of these findings for ethnic identity development and intergroup relations are discussed.
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Anxiety perseverance in intergroup interaction: When incidental explanations backfire
Tessa West, Adam Pearson & Chadly Stern
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, November 2014, Pages 825-843
Abstract:
Intergroup interactions are often anxiety provoking, and this can lead members of both majority and minority groups to avoid contact. Whereas negative consequences of experiencing intergroup anxiety are well documented, the role of perceived anxiety has received substantially less theoretical and empirical attention. We demonstrate in 3 experiments that the perception of anxiety in others can undermine intergroup interactions even when the anxiety can be attributed to a source that is unrelated to the interaction. Participants who learned that a cross-race partner’s anxiety could be attributed to an upcoming evaluation (Study 1) or a stimulant (i.e., caffeine, Studies 2 and 3) expressed less interest in continuing an interaction (Studies 1 and 2), showed less self-disclosure (Study 2), and increased physical distance between themselves and their partner (Study 3) than did those given no source information and participants who interacted with a same-race partner. Moreover, compared to control participants, perceivers who were given an incidental explanation for their partner’s anxiety perceived outgroup, but not ingroup, partners as more anxious (Studies 1 and 3) and showed heightened accessibility of anxiety words (Study 3), indicating that incidental source information enhanced accessibility of intergroup (but not intragroup) anxiety at early stages of information processing. Theoretical and practical implications for combating paradoxical effects of perceived anxiety in intergroup interactions are considered.
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Matthew Deegan et al.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
The current research reveals that while positive expectations about an anticipated intergroup interaction encourage generalization of positive contact to outgroup attitudes, negative expectations restrict the effects of contact on outgroup attitudes. In Study 1, when Blacks and Whites interacted with positive expectations, interaction quality predicted outgroup attitudes to a greater degree than when groups interacted with negative expectations. When expectations (Studies 2 and 3) and the actual interaction quality (Study 4) were manipulated orthogonally, negative expectations about the interaction predicted negative outgroup attitudes, regardless of actual interaction quality. By contrast, participants holding positive expectations who experienced a positive interaction expressed positive outgroup attitudes, whereas when they experienced a negative interaction, they expressed outgroup attitudes as negative as those with negative expectations. Across all four studies, positive expectations encouraged developing outgroup attitudes consistent with interaction quality.
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Michael Andreychik & Michael Gill
Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, forthcoming
Abstract:
Do essentialist conceptions of racial groups foster prejudice and negative attitudes? Existing literature provides mixed results. We propose that relations between essentialism and negative attitudes will become clearer in light of a new conceptualization of essentialism derived from literature on how laypersons reason about biological inheritance. Accordingly, we propose a distinction between two types of essentialism: Bio-somatic essentialism and bio-behavioral essentialism. Further, we distinguish both of these types of essentialism from entitativity, and argue that essentialism and entitativity exert independent effects on prejudice and negative attitudes. Study 1 shows that bio-behavioral essentialism — but not bio-somatic essentialism — contributes to prejudice, and that bio-behavioral essentialism and perceived entitativity exert independent effects on prejudice. In Study 2, we manipulate whether participants hold a bio-somatic essentialist, bio-behavioral essentialist, or antiessentialist theory about a novel group and show that bio-behavioral essentialism is uniquely facilitative of negative attitudes toward a negatively behaving outgroup. Finally, in Study 3 we manipulate both essentialist theories and entitativity and show that bio-behavioral essentialism and strong perceptions of entitativity independently increase negative attitudes. Because both bio-somatic essentialism and bio-behavioral essentialism involve seeing a group as a “natural kind,” our work suggests that only particular types of natural kind beliefs are related to negative attitudes.
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Wen Xiao et al.
Developmental Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
The present study examined whether perceptual individuation training with other-race faces could reduce preschool children's implicit racial bias. We used an ‘angry = outgroup’ paradigm to measure Chinese children's implicit racial bias against African individuals before and after training. In Experiment 1, children between 4 and 6 years were presented with angry or happy racially ambiguous faces that were morphed between Chinese and African faces. Initially, Chinese children demonstrated implicit racial bias: they categorized happy racially ambiguous faces as own-race (Chinese) and angry racially ambiguous faces as other-race (African). Then, the children participated in a training session where they learned to individuate African faces. Children's implicit racial bias was significantly reduced after training relative to that before training. Experiment 2 used the same procedure as Experiment 1, except that Chinese children were trained with own-race Chinese faces. These children did not display a significant reduction in implicit racial bias. Our results demonstrate that early implicit racial bias can be reduced by presenting children with other-race face individuation training, and support a linkage between perceptual and social representations of face information in children.
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Jorge Peña & Seung-Chul Yoo
Communication Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study examined the effects of avatar visual stereotypes and cognitive load on interpersonal attraction in virtual interactions. Avatars dressed in black were perceived as less attractive relative to identical avatars in white. The assumption that cognitively busy perceivers develop more stereotypical perceptions was rejected. Instead, cognitively non-busy participants developed more stereotypical impressions. Remarkably, cognitive load reversed avatar perceptions. Cognitively busy participants rated avatars in black as more attractive but avatars in white as less attractive. Perceived trust mediated the link between avatar appearance and task attraction. In addition, cognitive load moderated the strength of the indirect relationship between avatar appearance and task attraction through trust. The findings have important implications for virtual perceptions and misperceptions.