Ambiguity in Social Categorization: The Role of Prejudice and Facial Affect in Race Categorization

Authors: Hugenberg K.¹; Bodenhausen G.V.¹

Source: Psychological Science, Volume 15, Number 5, May 2004 , pp. 342-345(4)

Publisher: Blackwell Publishing

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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.

Document Type: Research article

DOI: 10.1111/j.0956-7976.2004.00680.x

Affiliations: 1: Northwestern University

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