Blatant dehumanization in the mind’s eye: Prevalent even among those who explicitly reject it?

Petsko, Christopher D.; Lei, Ryan; Kunst, Jonas R.; Bruneau, Emile; Kteily, Nour

doi:10.1037/xge0000961

Cited by 23 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 52 publications

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“…Separate samples of participants explicitly ascribed more positive (and fewer negative) traits to ingroup versus outgroup faces, implicitly evaluated ingroup faces more positively than outgroup faces, and displayed more trusting behavior toward ingroup versus outgroup faces in an economic trust game. These and other findings (e.g., Bjornsdottir, Yeretsian, West, & Rule, 2019;Brown-Iannuzzi, Dotsch, Cooley, & Payne, 2017;Hong & Ratner, 2021;Lei & Bodenhausen, 2017;Paulus, Rohr, Dotsch, & Wentura, 2016;Petsko, Lei, Kunst, Bruneau, & Kteily, 2020) attest to the prevalence of intergroup bias in visual representations of faces.…”

Section: Intergroup Bias In Visual Representations Of Facessupporting

confidence: 64%

Perspective taking reduces intergroup bias in visual representations of faces

et al. 2021

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Intergroup biases shape most aspects of person construal, including lower-level visual representations of group members' faces. Specifically, ingroup members' faces tend to be represented more positively than outgroup members' faces. Here, we used a reverse-correlation paradigm to test whether engaging in perspective taking (i. e., actively imagining another person's mental states) can reduce these biased visual representations. In an initial image-generation experiment, participants were randomly assigned to a minimal group and then composed a narrative essay about an ingroup or an outgroup target person, either while adopting the person's perspective or while following control instructions. Afterward, they generated an image of the person's face in a reversecorrelation image-classification task. Subsequent image-assessment experiments using an explicit rating task, a sequential priming task, and an economic trust game with separate samples of participants revealed that ingroup faces elicited more likability and trustworthiness than did outgroup faces. Importantly, this pattern of intergroup bias was consistently weaker in faces created by perspective takers. Additional image-assessment experiments identified the mouth (i.e., smiling cues) as a critical facial region wherein the interactive effects of group membership and perspective taking emerged. These findings provide initial evidence that perspective taking may be an effective strategy for attenuating, though not for eliminating, intergroup biases in visual representations of what group members look like.

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Section: Intergroup Bias In Visual Representations Of Facessupporting

confidence: 64%

Perspective taking reduces intergroup bias in visual representations of faces

et al. 2021

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“…A nonverbal “language of the eyes” is critical for adaptive communication (Adams, Ambady, et al, 2010), and dehumanized groups elicit less attention to eye regions critical to emotion judgments (Friesen et al, 2019). Relatedly, dehumanizing judgments and treatment emerge in everyday life (Kteily & Bruneau, 2017); with some groups and faces being seen as “less evolved” (Petsko et al, 2020). One possibility is that these faces are visualized in dehumanizing ways because their mental states are not well understood.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Decoding complex emotions and humanization show related face processing effects.

Cassidy¹,

Wiley²,

Sim³

et al. 2022

Emotion

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Inferring others' complex emotions is central to ascribing humanness to others. However, little past research has investigated the perceptual processes linking the inference of complex emotions to judging others' humanness. To this end, we disrupted the low-level perceptual processes typically employed in face processing via face inversion. Of interest was whether the inversion-driven deficits in complex emotion judgments and in humanness judgments were related. In three experiments, we find that disrupting efficient face processing via face inversion undermined the accurate decoding of complex emotions from the eyes (Experiments 1a, 1b, and 2) and triggered more dehumanized evaluations of target eye regions (Experiments 1a and 1b) and faces (Experiment 2). Critically, these inversion effects on emotion decoding and dehumanization were positively correlated. People who demonstrated stronger inversion effects on the accuracy of decoding complex emotions also demonstrated stronger inversion effects on dehumanizing evaluations. Taken together, these findings provide novel evidence that sensitivity to complex emotions and (de)humanization are related through a shared perceptual basis in efficient face processing.

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“…6Previous research indicates that n = 50 people per condition is sufficient to arrive at stable composite images from reverse-correlation tasks (Petsko et al, 2021). …”

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confidence: 99%

Are leaders still presumed white by default? Racial bias in leader categorization revisited.

Petsko

Rosette

2023

Journal of Applied Psychology

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In the United States, leaders of the highest valued companies, best-ranked universities, and most-consumed media outlets are more likely to be White than what would be expected based on White people’s representation in the U.S. population. One explanation for this racial gap is that U.S. respondents’ prototype of a leader is White by default—which is, in turn, what causes White (vs. non-White) people to be promoted up the organizational ladder more quickly. Although this explanation has empirical support, its central premise was recently challenged by experimental evidence documenting that U.S. respondents no longer associate leaders, more than nonleaders, with being White. To reconcile these contradictory findings, we conducted three preregistered experiments (N = 1,316) on the topic of whether leaders, more than nonleaders, continue to be associated with Whiteness (i.e., being categorized as White or being represented with stereotypically White qualities). Results suggest that associations between leaders and Whiteness hold up to scrutiny, but that detecting them may depend on what methods researchers employ. In particular, when researchers use direct methods of detecting racial assumptions (e.g., self-report measures), there appears to be no evidence of an association between leaders and Whiteness (Experiment 1). Yet, when researchers use more indirect methods of detecting racial assumptions (e.g., a Princeton trilogy task), an association between leaders and Whiteness readily emerges (Experiments 2 and 3). In short, although respondents refrain from freely expressing associations they may harbor between leaders and Whiteness, these associations do not appear to have dissipated with time.

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Blatant dehumanization in the mind’s eye: Prevalent even among those who explicitly reject it?

Cited by 23 publications

References 52 publications

Perspective taking reduces intergroup bias in visual representations of faces

Perspective taking reduces intergroup bias in visual representations of faces

Decoding complex emotions and humanization show related face processing effects.

Are leaders still presumed white by default? Racial bias in leader categorization revisited.

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