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.

Historical representations explicitly depicting Blacks as apelike have largely disappeared in the United States, yet a mental association between Blacks and apes remains. Here, the authors demonstrate that U.S. citizens implicitly associate Blacks and apes. In a series of laboratory studies, the authors reveal how this association influences study participants' basic cognitive processes and significantly alters their judgments in criminal justice contexts. Specifically, this Black-ape association alters visual perception and attention, and it increases endorsement of violence against Black suspects. In an archival study of actual criminal cases, the authors show that news articles written about Blacks who are convicted of capital crimes are more likely to contain ape-relevant language than news articles written about White convicts. Moreover, those who are implicitly portrayed as more apelike in these articles are more likely to be executed by the state than those who are not. The authors argue that examining the subtle persistence of specific historical representations such as these may not only enhance contemporary research on dehumanization, stereotyping, and implicit processes but also highlight common forms of discrimination that previously have gone unrecognized.

The social category "children" defines a group of individuals who are perceived to be distinct, with essential characteristics including innocence and the need for protection (Haslam, Rothschild, & Ernst, 2000). The present research examined whether Black boys are given the protections of childhood equally to their peers. We tested 3 hypotheses: (a) that Black boys are seen as less "childlike" than their White peers, (b) that the characteristics associated with childhood will be applied less when thinking specifically about Black boys relative to White boys, and (c) that these trends would be exacerbated in contexts where Black males are dehumanized by associating them (implicitly) with apes (Goff, Eberhardt, Williams, & Jackson, 2008). We expected, derivative of these 3 principal hypotheses, that individuals would perceive Black boys as being more responsible for their actions and as being more appropriate targets for police violence. We find support for these hypotheses across 4 studies using laboratory, field, and translational (mixed laboratory/field) methods. We find converging evidence that Black boys are seen as older and less innocent and that they prompt a less essential conception of childhood than do their White same-age peers. Further, our findings demonstrate that the Black/ape association predicted actual racial disparities in police violence toward children. These data represent the first attitude/behavior matching of its kind in a policing context. Taken together, this research suggests that dehumanization is a uniquely dangerous intergroup attitude, that intergroup perception of children is underexplored, and that both topics should be research priorities.

Four studies investigate the role that stereotype threat plays in producing racial distancing behavior in an anticipated conversation paradigm. It was hypothesized that the threat of appearing racist may have the ironic effect of causing Whites to distance themselves from Black conversation partners. In Study 1, participants distanced themselves more from Black partners under conditions of threat, and this distance correlated with the activation of a "White racist" stereotype. In Study 2, it was demonstrated that Whites' interracial distancing behavior was not predicted by explicit or implicit prejudice. Study 3 provides evidence that conceiving of interracial interactions as opportunities to learn may attenuate the negative consequences of threat for Whites. Study 4 found that Whites have conscious access to their experience of stereotype threat and that this awareness may mediate the relationship between threat and distance. These results are discussed within a broader discourse of racial distancing and the possibility that certain identity threats may be as important as prejudice in determining the outcomes of interracial interactions.

The present experiments suggest that the desire to benefit the in-group drives dominant-group members' policy preferences, independent of concern for out-groups' outcomes. In Experiment 1, the effect of a manipulation of affirmative action procedures on policy support was mediated by how Whites expected the policy to affect fellow Whites, but not by the expected effect on minorities. In Experiments 2 and 3, when focused on losses for the White in-group, Whites' racial identity was negatively related to support for affirmative action. However, when focused on gains for the Black out-group or when participants were told that Whites were not affected by the policy, racial identity did not predict attitudes toward the policy. In Experiments 2 and 3, perceived fairness mediated these effects.

Our research examines whether intersecting racial and gender identities affect person perception. Predominantly White undergraduates (292) from a large northeastern U.S. university categorized and rated pictures (Study 1) and videos (Study 2) of Black and White men and women. We supported three hypotheses: 1) intersectionality affects person perception processes, leading to gender categorization errors for Black women; 2) "Blackness" and "maleness" are highly associated for Black male and female targets; and, 3) women are perceived as unattractive proportionally to their perceived masculinity, leading Black women to be rated as less attractive than other women. We suggest that intersectional approaches are required in order to fully understand person perception. Further, the Black/male association may lead to unique harms for Black women.

According to stereotype threat theory (Steele, 1997), stereotyped targets under-perform on challenging tests, in part because they are worried about being viewed in terms of the negative stereotype that they are intellectually inferior. How then are the negative effects of stereotype threat reduced for stereotyped targets? To examine this issue, a study was conducted to investigate whether stereotype threat's adverse effects are reduced when a Black experimenter administers a verbal test to Black participants. We further examined the question of whether Black participants have a subjective awareness of stereotype threat. Results showed that when a Black experimenter gave a verbal test to Black participants, they did not suffer the typical performance decrements associated with stereotype threat. Additionally, results supported the hypothesis that Black participants have conscious access to the experience of stereotype threat and that this effect is partially mediated by their endorsement of the stereotype.

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