Seeing black: race, crime, and visual processing.
Using police officers and undergraduates as participants, the authors investigated the influence of stereotypic associations on visual processing in 5 studies. Study 1 demonstrates that Black faces influence participants' ability to spontaneously detect degraded images of crime-relevant objects. Conversely, Studies 2-4 demonstrate that activating abstract concepts (i.e., crime and basketball) induces attentional biases toward Black male faces. Moreover, these processing biases may be related to the degree to which a social group member is physically representative of the social group (Studies 4-5). These studies, taken together, suggest that some associations between social groups and concepts are bidirectional and operate as visual tuning devices--producing shifts in perception and attention of a sort likely to influence decision making and behavior.
Eberhardt
Jennifer L
JL
Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA. jle@psych.stanford.edu
Goff
Phillip Atiba
PA
Purdie
Valerie J
VJ
Davies
Paul G
PG
D001741:Black or African American; D001288:Attention; D003415:Crime; D005006:Ethnicity; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D012938:Social Perception; D013240:Stereotyping; D014796:Visual Perception