An eye for the I: Preferential attention to the eyes of ingroup members.

Abstract

Human faces, and more specifically the eyes, play a crucial role in social and nonverbal communication because they signal valuable information about others. It is therefore surprising that few studies have investigated the impact of intergroup contexts and motivations on attention to the eyes of ingroup and outgroup members. Four experiments investigated differences in eye gaze to racial and novel ingroups using eye tracker technology. Whereas Studies 1 and 3 demonstrated that White participants attended more to the eyes of White compared to Black targets, Study 2 showed a similar pattern of attention to the eyes of novel ingroup and outgroup faces. Studies 3 and 4 also provided new evidence that eye gaze is flexible and can be meaningfully influenced by current motivations. Specifically, instructions to individuate specific social categories increased attention to the eyes of target group members. Furthermore, the latter experiments demonstrated that preferential attention to the eyes of ingroup members predicted important intergroup biases such as recognition of ingroup over outgroup faces (i.e., the Own Race Bias; Study 3) and willingness to interact with outgroup members (Study 4). The implication of these findings for general theorizing on face perception, individuation processes, and intergroup relations are discussed.Keywords: intergroup bias, social categorization, individuation, prejudice, Own Race Bias, face perception, social vision PREFERENTIAL ATTENTION TO THE EYES OF INGROUP MEMBERS 3An Eye for the I: Preferential Attention to the Eyes of Ingroup MembersThe human face is arguably the most important of all social stimuli because it is such a rich source of information. Faces, and more specifically the eyes, play crucial roles in social and nonverbal communication, signaling valuable information about others (Adams & Kleck, 2003Niedenthal, Mermillod, Maringer, & Hess, 2010). Despite the key role that the eyes play in social cognition, few studies have investigated the impact of intergroup contexts and motivation on attention to the eyes of ingroup and outgroup members. Although research has convincingly demonstrated that perceivers are better at understanding and extracting information from faces that belong to ingroups relative to outgroups (Adams, Franklin, Nelson, & Stevenson, 2010;Chiao et al., 2008;, it remains unclear how people process faces from their own and other categories and whether distinct patterns of attention to specific facial features exist for these groups.The current research seeks to address this gap directly. To this end, we first provide a general review of the literature regarding the central role of the eyes in social perception, and in particular, their role when perceiving ingroup and outgroup members. Then we move to a discussion regarding the impact of motivation on eye gaze and the relationship between eye gaze, and two important intergroup biases: the Own Race Bias (Hugenberg, Young, Bernstein, & Sacco, 2010;Meissner & Brigham, 2001;Sporer, 2001) and a willing...

Don’t Look Me in the Eyes: Automatic Orientation to the Eyes of In- and Outgroup Members

“…Inconsistently to this, a recent study by Kawakami et al (2014) found that 29 Caucasian participants attended longer to the eyes of White compared with Black target faces. The inconsistency in the results by Nakabayashi et al (2012), and Kawakami et al (2014) might be due to methodological issues: Unlike Nakabayashi et al (2012), Kawakami et al (2014) presented the stimuli faces pairwise. The reported e ect of preferential attention to the eyes of ingroup members was found in cross-race pairs, i.e.…”

“…when White and Black faces were presented simultaneously. This procedure may have influenced the results by Kawakami et al (2014) significantly and most other studies on intergroup di erences in visual attention used single target faces (Blais et al, 2008;Goldinger et al, 2009;Nakabayashi et al, 2012;Wu et al, 2012). Nevertheless, this procedure provides valuable insight about how people process two faces of di erent races simultaneously as it occurs regularly in AUTOMATIC ORIENTATION TO IN-AND OUTGROUP EYES 10 day-to-day life in multicultural societies.…”

“…Despite this, Kawakami et al (2014) found that participants attended preferentially to the eyes of ingroup members even in a minimal group situation: 59 participants were randomly assigned to either a blue or purple group but were told that these groups represent two types of personalities based on their answers in a previous personality test. Participants then viewed pairs of White faces and were told that the background colour of the photographs indicates the membership to either the blue or purple personality group.…”

“…In two further experiments, Kawakami et al (2014) also studied the impact of motivation to individuate a member of a certain social category on eye gaze. In an "Individuate Black" condition, participants were instructed to try to remember the faces of Black people as "individuals with special attention to what makes them unique".…”

“…Recent research and theories in social psychology indicate that people use di erent strategies for ingroup versus outgroup face processing (Calder et al, 2011). For instance, a recent eye tracking study by Kawakami et al (2014) demonstrated that people preferentially attend to the eyes of ingroup over outgroup members. Yet, it is still unclear which processes underlie the tendency to look towards the eye region: Do people use di erent mechanisms for the bias towards the eyes in ingroup relative to outgroup face processing?…”