Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2004 Vol 87 No 6 876 893 Copyright 2004 by the American Psychological Association 0022 3514 04 12 00 DOI 10 1037 0022 3514 87 6 876 Seeing Black Race Crime and Visual Processing Jennifer L Eberhardt Phillip Atiba Goff Stanford University The Pennsylvania State University Valerie J Purdie Paul G Davies Yale University University of California Los Angeles Using police officers and undergraduates as participants the authors investigated the influence of stereotypic associations on visual processing in 5 studies Study 1 demonstrates that Black faces influence participants ability to spontaneously detect degraded images of crime relevant objects Conversely Studies 2 4 demonstrate that activating abstract concepts i e crime and basketball induces attentional biases toward Black male faces Moreover these processing biases may be related to the degree to which a social group member is physically representative of the social group Studies 4 5 These studies taken together suggest that some associations between social groups and concepts are bidirectional and operate as visual tuning devices producing shifts in perception and attention of a sort likely to influence decision making and behavior The paradigmatic understanding of the automatic stereotyping process indeed the one pursued in all of the research highlighted above is that the mere presence of a person can lead one to think about the concepts with which that person s social group has become associated The mere presence of a Black man for instance can trigger thoughts that he is violent and criminal Simply thinking about a Black person renders these concepts more accessible and can lead people to misremember the Black person as the one holding the razor Merely thinking about Blacks can lead people to evaluate ambiguous behavior as aggressive to miscategorize harmless objects as weapons or to shoot quickly and at times inappropriately In the current article we argue that just as Black faces and Black bodies can trigger thoughts of crime thinking of crime can trigger thoughts of Black people that is some associations between social groups and concepts are bidirectional Although contemporary social psychological research has exhaustively documented the fact that social groups can activate concepts e g Bargh Chen Burrows 1996 Brewer Dull Lui 1981 Chen Bargh 1997 Dovidio Evans Tyler 1986 Dovidio Kawakami Johnson Johnson Howard 1997 Fazio Jackson Dunton Williams 1995 Gaertner McLaughlin 1983 Gilbert Hixon 1991 Kawakami Dion Dovidio 1998 Lepore Brown 1997 Macrae Bodenhausen Milne 1995 Macrae Bodenhausen Milne Thorn Castelli 1997 Macrae Stangor Milne 1994 Moskowitz Gollwitzer Wasel Schaal 1999 Perdue Gurtman 1990 Wittenbrink Judd Park 1997 only a small number of studies have probed the converse the possibility that concepts by themselves can activate social groups Blair Banaji 1996 Kawakami Dovidio 2001 Kawakami Dovidio Moll Hermsen Russin 2000 In one such study Blair and Banaji 1996 found that participants exposed to feminine or masculine primes were able to more quickly categorize as female or male those targets consistent with the primes For instance after The stereotype of Black Americans as violent and criminal has been documented by social psychologists for almost 60 years Allport Postman 1947 Correll Park Judd Wittenbrink 2002 Devine 1989 Duncan 1976 Greenwald Oakes Hoffman 2003 Payne 2001 Sagar Schofield 1980 Researchers have highlighted the robustness and frequency of this stereotypic association by demonstrating its effects on numerous outcome variables including people s memory for who was holding a deadly razor in a subway scene Allport Postman 1947 people s evaluation of ambiguously aggressive behavior Devine 1989 Duncan 1976 Sagar Schofield 1980 people s decision to categorize nonweapons as weapons Payne 2001 the speed at which people decide to shoot someone holding a weapon Correll et al 2002 and the probability that they will shoot at all Correll et al 2002 Greenwald et al 2003 Not only is the association between Blacks and crime strong i e consistent and frequent it also appears to be automatic i e not subject to intentional control Payne 2001 Payne Lambert Jacoby 2002 Jennifer L Eberhardt Department of Psychology Stanford University Phillip Atiba Goff Department of Psychology The Pennsylvania State University Valerie J Purdie Department of Psychology Yale University Paul G Davies Department of Psychology University of California Los Angeles This research was supported by National Science Foundation Grant BCS 9986128 and a grant from the Research Institute of Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University awarded to Jennifer L Eberhardt We thank Nalini Ambady R Richard Banks Anders Ericsson Hazel Markus Benoit Monin Jennifer Richeson Lee Ross Claude Steele and Robert Zajonc for their helpful comments on versions of this article Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Jennifer L Eberhardt Department of Psychology Stanford University Jordan Hall Building 420 Stanford CA 94305 E mail jle psych stanford edu 876 SEEING BLACK participants were exposed to such words as flowers or diet they categorized female targets faster than male targets Using the same technique Kawakami and colleagues Kawakami Dovidio 2001 Kawakami et al 2000 later demonstrated that Black stereotypic primes could facilitate the racial categorization of Black faces as well In their studies stereotypic traits appeared to automatically prime the Black racial category just as the Black racial category automatically primed stereotypic traits These results seem perplexing when considered in the context of standard associative network models of stereotyping Anderson Klatzky 1987 Fazio et al 1995 Lepore Brown 1997 The associative network approach suggests that social category nodes will more readily activate concept nodes than the reverse According to such models the likelihood that one node will activate the other depends on the strength of the associative link Fazio Sanbonmatsu Powell Kardes 1986 Fazio Williams Powell 2000 Neely 1977 Social categories e g Black Americans tend to be strongly associated with a limited richly connected set of concepts e g aggressive musical athletic poor Concepts in contrast tend to have broad sparse associations Anderson Klatzky 1987 For example the concept aggressive is associated with a diverse assortment of social categories including Black
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