Abstract
Black people are still considered to be one of the most stigmatized groups and have to face multiple prejudices that undermine their well-being. Assumptions and beliefs about other racial groups are quite pervasive and have been shown to impact basic social tasks such as face processing. For example, individuals with high racial prejudice conceptualize other-race faces as less trustworthy and more criminal. However, it is unknown if implicit racial bias could modulate even low-level perceptual mechanisms such as spatial frequency (SF) extraction when judging the level of trustworthiness of other-race faces. The present study showed that although similar facial features are used to judge the trustworthiness of White and Black faces, own-race faces are processed in lower SF (i.e. coarse information such as the contour of the face and blurred shapes as opposed to high SF representing fine-grained information such as eyelashes or fine wrinkles). This pattern was modulated by implicit race biases: higher implicit biases are associated with a significantly higher reliance on low SF with White than with Black faces.
Highlights
From a simple look at a face, it is possible to obtain a wealth of information such as race, gender, age or emotional state [1,2]
To allow us to infer which facial information increases the probability of correctly discriminating faces’ trustworthiness, the Bubbles method used in Phase 3 relies on participants making errors related to information availability, over and above errors associated with the task difficulty when stimuli are completely revealed
The present study examined whether implicit racial biases modulate the visual information used to judge trustworthiness of own- vs. other-race faces
Summary
From a simple look at a face, it is possible to obtain a wealth of information such as race, gender, age or emotional state [1,2]. Even with faces viewed for a very short duration, individuals show a high interindividual agreement in their face trustworthiness judgments [8,9]. Studies show that these judgments are biased by the appearance of faces. A neutral face showing slight signs of happiness, a facial expression strongly associated with changes in mouth shape [10], will be judged as more trustworthy [8,11]. A neutral face in which facial features slightly overlap with those associated with anger, for instance V-shaped eyebrows and a high contrasted fold between eyebrows [12], will be deemed relatively untrustworthy [8,11].
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