BACKGROUND

RESEARCH QUESTION

REFERENCES

PROPOSED METHODS

DISCUSSION

The Social Distance Scale asks about 14 different roles in terms of each measured race.

I would be willing to have a White person as my Roommate: STRONGLY STRONGLY AGREE DISAGREE 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

I would be willing to have a Black person as my Family Physician: STRONGLY STRONGLY AGREE DISAGREE 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

In a previous study, participants rated both White and Black faces for how close the facial features were to stereotypes of Black men. So a stereotypical face (White or Black) has many stereotypically Black features. An atypical face has few stereotypically Black features.

Stereotypical Atypical What do we mean by

Stereotypical and Atypical faces?

The Face of Fear: Implicit Associations Between Stereotypical Face Type and Perception of Threat

Susan Conklin, Alesha Bond, Dr. Heather Kleider-Offutt, Georgia State University

We seek to :

• Deconstruct the connection between racial bias and stereotypicality by examining specific attributes comprising that racial bias for Black and Arab Americans.

• Examine whether stereotypical features affect racial bias against Arab Americans, and attempt to separate racial stereotypicality from religious iconography.

• Contribute to the framing of explicit measures of anti-Arab bias.

• Contribute to the framing of anti-discrimination training targeting implicit racial bias.

What specific implicit attributions comprise racial bias towards Black and Arab Americans, and are those

attributions related to stereotypicality of facial features?

The Implicit Association Test measures implicit associations between categories.4

a. Participants practice rating images of non-humans and objects: either “threatening” or “safe.”

b. They practice rating images of human faces: either “stereotypical” or “atypical.” This gives us a baseline of how the individual defines stereotypicality.

c. They sort images using combined categories.

Explicit Bias:

• Conscious beliefs, deliberate behavior

• Easy to measure directly with surveys

• Influenced by social norms; suppressible with deliberate thought

• Target of most anti-discrimination training

Implicit Bias:

• Unconscious beliefs, automatic behavior

• Difficult to measure directly (shoot/no-shoot tests)

• Influenced by priming; may not be suppressible

• May require a completely new approach to training.

When jurors decide whether an individual receives the death penalty, their decisions may be influenced by racial stereotypes 1,3. When police make split-second decisions about whether to use their firearms in the field, their decisions may rely in part on racial stereotypes 2.

Black Americans

• Perception of criminality associated with looking “stereotypically Black” or “prototypically Black”1,2,3,5

• Bias affects trial sentencing (including death penalty), eyewitness misidentification, police shoot decisions, etc. 1,2,3,5

(1) Blair, I. V., Judd, C. M., Sadler, M. S., & Jenkins, C. (2002). The role of Afrocentric features in person perception: Judging by features and categories. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(1), 5-25. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.83.1.5

(2) Correll, J., Wittenbrink, B., Crawford, M. T., & Sadler, M. S. (2015). Stereotypic vision: How stereotypes disambiguate visual stimuli. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 108(2), 219-233. doi:10.1037/pspa0000015

(3) Eberhardt, J. L., Davies, P. G., Purdie-Vaughns, V. J., & Johnson, S. (2006). Looking deathworthy: Perceived stereotypicality of Black defendants predicts capital-sentencing outcomes. Psychological Science, 17(5), 383-386. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01716.x

(4) Greenwald, A. G., McGhee, D., & Schwartz, J. L. (1998). Measuring individual differences in implicit cognition: The implicit association test. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 6, 1464-1480.

(5) Knuycky, L. R., Kleider, H. M., & Cavrak, S. E. (2014). Line-up Misidentifications: When being ‘prototypically Black’ is perceived as criminal. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 28(1), 39-46. doi: 10.1002/acp.2954

(6) Park, J., Felix, K., & Lee, G. (2007). Implicit attitudes towards Arab-Muslims and the moderating effects of social information. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 29(1), 35-45. doi:10.1080/01973530701330942

(7) Saleem, M., & Anderson, C. A. (2013). Arabs as terrorists: Effects of stereotypes within violent contexts on attitudes, perceptions, and affect. Psychology of Violence, 3(1), 84-99. doi:10.1037/a0030038

Arab Americans

• Emerging as a racial identity due to surge in hostility and anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim sentiment

• More negative implicit associations with Muslim-Arab individuals than with Black individuals in some studies6

• Little or no research into stereotypicality of Arab –American faces or specific attributes comprising racial biases; confounds “Arab” with “Muslim”7

We use a Social Distance Scale (SDS) to measure explicit racial bias and compare the results with our implicit measure.

High or Low Prejudice Scoring: score of participant’s race minus scores for other races.

When a participant responds faster to the “stereotypical or threatening” pair than the “stereotypical or safe” pair, it indicates an implicit association between stereotypicality and threat.

Combined categories are where we get our data