Year: 2022
Type: preprint
Abstract: Decades of research has sought to characterize how the racialization of faces affects the evaluation of those faces. However, research has mostly focused on the perception of single faces. In the current project we address this gap by examining whether racialization impacts crowd perception, even in the absence of differences perception at the single-face level. In Experiments 1-2, we showed participants crowds of faces expressing different degrees of happiness or anger, manipulating the ratio of lighter-skinned faces racialized as White and darker-skinned faces racialized as Black. Greater proportion of Black faces increased the likelihood that the crowd was perceived as emotional. In Experiment 3 we confirmed that this effect was not merely driven by the contrast between White and Black faces within a crowd, as crowds composed of solely Black faces were more likely to be evaluated as emotional than crowds of White and Black faces. We used a hierarchical drift diffusion model to compare potential mechanisms, and found that Black faces expressing emotions weighed more heavily than White faces in pushing participants to judge a crowd as emotional. These results shed light on an important way in which racialization impacts social cognition.
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
SDG: Reduced inequalities
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4289295982