Subliminal racial primes alter speed of crime-object detection

Evidence

Conveying the effects of “race priming” (displaying an image so quickly that the participant doesn’t realize they’ve seen it) can be powerful. These studies assess how quickly participants see crime related or neutral objects in pixilated images and found that people primed with the face of a Black man were faster to see crime related objects and primed with the face of a White man are slower to see crime related objects when compared to a control of fuzzy orange lines White faces, (Eberhardt et al., 2014)—even when the faces are of five-year-old Black and White boys (Todd et al., 2016). — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 1365

Categorization

• QUESTION: Implication: if primes are subliminal, awareness-based training may have limited reach — does this undercut the book’s own training model?
• XREF: Links to Eberhardt’s Stanford lab work and broader literature on unconscious race processing.