The Black-crime stereotype physically alters visual perception, attention, and memory

Evidence

The Black-crime association is so strong that it alters basic perception and attention, including what we see, where we look, and what we remember. My colleague Jennifer Eberhardt and her collaborators (2004) have documented that, in a mutually reinforcing way, exposure to Black people prompts thoughts of crime, and the concept of crime draws attention to Black people (Eberhardt, Goff, Purdie, & Davies, 2004). In a subliminal priming procedure, in which information was presented to participants so quickly (e.g., mere fractions of a second) that they could not consciously detect what they had seen, undergraduate participants were exposed to either Black or White faces (or non-faces in a baseline control condition). After being exposed to Black faces, participants more readily detected degraded images of weapons as part of an object recognition task. After being exposed to White faces, however, their ability to detect those same weapons was inhibited. Thus, the Black-crime association acts as a visual tuning device, sharpening perception in some cases, helping us see what we expect to see, and dulling it in others by blinding us to what we do not expect. In the reverse direction, subliminal exposure to crime led people to pay more attention to Black faces than to White faces. Eberhardt and colleagues found that this was the case for police officers as well as civilians. When officers were subliminally primed with crime by being exposed to words like “arrest” and “shoot,” they too became more likely to pay attention to Black faces. — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 403

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader implicit-bias literature (Greenwald, Kahneman) and to work on perception-shaping stereotypes in social cognition. — connects to: An inserted black body makes invisible whiteness and its amnesiac temporality visible — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 519
• SEED: Angle: the Black-crime stereotype as a literal ‘visual tuning device’ that makes perceptual error, not just attitude, the site of bias enforcement.