The Role Of Implicit Prejudice In The Categorization Of Racially Ambiguous Faces

One of the many topics in social psychology is how people think about and view one another and how each view affects one another. Prejudice views about a group are usually negative these views can be extremely hurtful in society, whether it be races, religion, gender, or anything else. Some of the prejudice groups face stem from misunderstandings about them which may lead to negative consequences for both sides. This paper relates to the majority of Chapter 11: Sources of Prejudice and Chapter 12: Consequences of prejudice in the textbook, because these chapters are related to the role prejudice has in society. These textbook chapters are also related to the paper because they look at the consequences of racial prejudice and how people react to facing prejudice in today’s society. This paper explores if certain individuals have a perception about a particular race, will this thought make them believe that your race can determine if you are angrier than another race. In this paper, we argue that an individual who has a high level of unconscious prejudice is more likely to see an angry facial expression and assume it is a black person when compared to someone that has a low level of unconscious prejudice. The study was done to figure out how highly prejudice people view other races when it comes to emotions.

In the paper, the researchers reference two other studies that have been done in relation to the topic. The first reference is a study done by Maclin and Malpass; they found that when a face is given a stereotypical hairstyle they were more likely to be told that they belonged to the race in which the hairstyle belonged too. The other reference is a study done by Hugenberg and Bodenhausen; in this study, the researchers showed the participants faces and they had to choose whether the face belonged to a black or white person. They found that white participants that were high in prejudice found the black face to be angry compared to their counterparts.

This study was used to assess the hypothesis that people with a high prejudice would suggest an angry face belonged to a black person than those with lower levels of prejudice. There was one common method used to conduct the findings for this research. There where eighty-two university undergrad students that consisted of seventy-three females and nine males. The independent variable in this experiment was the creation of the different faces with the help of a computer generator. Each participant was shown nine computer-generated faces that were created using different settings for ethnicity, racial features and expression of emotions.

The emotions shown include happy, neutral and angry while the races showed where black and white race, the only difference of the face where the skin colour and the emotions displayed everything else was the same. To do the experiment each participant was shown the pictures on a computer screen and where asked questions such as “What emotion is being displayed? (Happy, neutral, angry); How confident are you in this decision? (1—not at all confident to 9 — very confident); How intense is the emotion being displayed? (1— not intense to 9 — very intense); and what race is this individual?.” The dependent variable in this experiment is the results based on the participant’s judgment of which expression belonged to which race. The results of the experiment showed that people who have a high amount of prejudice were more likely to judge angry faces as black than those who are less prejudiced. The finding found in this study where close to the other studies mentioned above, in which they all found that high prejudice can influence a person's perceptions.

Prejudice can sometimes lead to discrimination, stereotyping, bigotry and many more; which can cause many implications in society. These implications can be done by sharing your prejudice thoughts with others or by being harmful to others. Prejudice in certain places can also have a more negative effect on the person who is receiving it, for example in the workplace or at school. Prejudice can also be one of the many faults behind devastating historical events such as slavery and genocide. Being prejudice can also prevent you from learning new things about something because you do not want to change the opinion you have formed in your head of someone or something. With that being said a prejudice society may also allow groups to come together and attempt to fight the prejudice they are receiving as a whole.