Implicit race attitudes modulate visual information extraction for trustworthiness judgments

Abstract

Black people are still considered to be one of the most stigmatized groups and have to face multiple prejudices that undermine their well-being. Assumptions and beliefs about other racial groups are quite pervasive and have been shown to impact basic social tasks such as face processing. For example, individuals with high racial prejudice conceptualize other-race faces as less trustworthy and more criminal. However, it is unknown if implicit racial bias could modulate even low-level perceptual mechanisms such as spatial frequency (SF) extraction when judging the level of trustworthiness of other-race faces. The present study showed that although similar facial features are used to judge the trustworthiness of White and Black faces, own-race faces are processed in lower SF (i.e. coarse information such as the contour of the face and blurred shapes as opposed to high SF representing fine-grained information such as eyelashes or fine wrinkles). This pattern was modulated by implicit race biases: higher implicit biases are associated with a significantly higher reliance on low SF with White than with Black faces.