Seeing Black: Race, Crime, and Visual Processing.
2004/12/01 by Jennifer L. Eberhardt, Phillip Atiba Goff, Valerie J. Purdie +1 · 1,217 citations
Neuroscience · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Basketball #Cognitive psychology #Face Recognition and Perception #Perception #Psychology #Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment #Race (biology) #Social and Intergroup Psychology #Social perception #Social psychology #Visual perception #Visual processing #sort
paper · doi:10.1037/0022-3514.87.6.876
published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 87(6), 876-893 (American Psychological Association)
openalex publication_date 2004/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04
Abstract
Using police officers and undergraduates as participants, the authors investigated the influence of stereotypic associations on visual processing in 5 studies. Study 1 demonstrates that Black faces influence participants' ability to spontaneously detect degraded images of crime-relevant objects. Conversely, Studies 2-4 demonstrate that activating abstract concepts (i.e., crime and basketball) induces attentional biases toward Black male faces. Moreover, these processing biases may be related to the degree to which a social group member is physically representative of the social group (Studies 4-5). These studies, taken together, suggest that some associations between social groups and concepts are bidirectional and operate as visual tuning devices--producing shifts in perception and attention of a sort likely to influence decision making and behavior.
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