PREJUDICE AND RACISMPERCEPTUAL BIAS
Besides contact theory, psychologists have also been pursuing less
obvious anti-prejudice interventions. One such approach has targeted
the well-established finding that people are better at distinguishing
between faces belonging to people of their own racial background. This
is the polite way of describing the “they all look the same” experience,
whereby members of other racial groups seem to look more similar to
each other than to members of our own racial group. Sophie Lebrecht
at Brown University reasoned that this perceptual bias could fuel preju-
dice. She and her colleagues trained a group of white students to better
distinguish between African-American faces while a control group
spent the same amount of time just looking at African-American faces.
Afterwards the trained group showed reduced prejudice towards African
Americans relative to the control group. This makes intuitive sense –
presumably learning to see the visible differences between people of
another race makes it harder to lump them altogether from a social and
cultural perspective.
For people trying too hard to conceal their racist tendencies, be they
real or imagined, it’s worth bearing in mind that attempting to appear
The Implicit Association Test is a favourite toy of researchers and
lots of studies show that it predicts people’s actual behaviour and their
explicit attitudes. But the test is not without its critics. For example,
it’s possible that people might associate two categories more easily,
not because of their implicit attitudes, but simply because those two
categories are frequently paired together in the media. To return to
our earlier example, just think of all the news coverage given to Islamic
fundamentalism. Supporting this concern, in 2006 Anna Han at Ohio
State University showed that participants’ implicit attitudes towards
two Japanese Pokémon toys was easily influenced by a brief video
featuring a child saying that she preferred the toy which, based on
information presented earlier, was clearly inferior. Another criticism is
that participants’ responses in the test are not entirely the product of
their subconscious attitudes, and that they are exercising some sort
of control over them. For example, another 2006 study, this time by
researchers at Iowa State University, found that heterosexual students
showed less homophobia on the Implicit Association Test when they
thought the results would be made public than when they thought the
results would be kept private.