Seeing Race 91Cognitivist Model of Racism: A Review of Wilson, Hugenberg,
and Rule (2017)
Shifting the discussion to the topics germane to CRP, consider the
perception of race. For this, psychologists have generally adopted a
cognitivist model of perception. This model assumes that stimuli in the
environment interact with the bodily sense organs, and the human
perceives something meaningful. The jump between sense-organ and
perception is still unclear. Indeed, it is not uncommon to hear
psychologists say for example that the brain sees.
A cognitivist approach to perception would maintain that racial
discrimination is a consequence of the interaction-effects of independent
variables. There is no space for cultural ideology there, unless it has been
operationalized into variable-format. As it pertains to the problems
presented in the literature review, shape, size, muscularity, as well as
whichever sense-stimuli that could be associated with race (such as skin
color) can each be understood as independent variables. By controlling the
combinations of these variables, psychologists can presumably determine
whether or not an irrelevant variable (such as skin color) interacts with
other variables (such as size and muscularity). This is precisely what
Wilson, Hugenberg, and Rule (2017) have done.
Wilson et al. hoped to demonstrate how the independent variables that
constitute race influenced the perception of unrelated variables. Their
article, titled “Racial Bias in Judgments of Physical Size and
Formidability: From Size to Threat,” accomplishes exactly this. The
authors asked nearly 1,000 participants to make judgments about the
height, weight, strength, and formidability of pictures of young black men
and young white men. Given the publicity of American football recruiting,
the researchers were able to access profiles of thousands of young men
who were prospective college and professional football players, complete
with height, weight, and weightlifting statistics. These statistics could be
compared with the participants’ judgments of height, weight, and
weightlifting based on the athletes’ pictures.