Political partisanship influences perception of biracial candidates’ skin tonePosted in Articles, Barack Obama, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, United States on 2010-09-23 02:31Z by Steven |
Political partisanship influences perception of biracial candidates’ skin tone
Proceedings of the National Acadamy of Sciences
Volume 106, Number 48 (2009-12-01)
pages 20168-20173
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0905362106
Eugene M. Caruso, Assistant Professor of Behavioral Science
Booth School of Business, University of Chicago
Nicole L. Mead, Researcher
Tilburg Institute for Behavioral Economics Research
Tilburg University, The Netherlands
Emily Balcetis, Assistant Professor of Psychology
New York University
Edited by Richard E. Nisbett, Theodore M. Newcomb Distinguished University Professor of Psychology
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
People tend to view members of their own political group more positively than members of a competing political group. In this article, we demonstrate that political partisanship influences people’s visual representations of a biracial political candidate’s skin tone. In three studies, participants rated the representativeness of photographs of a hypothetical (Study 1) or real (Barack Obama; Studies 2 and 3) biracial political candidate. Unbeknownst to participants, some of the photographs had been altered to make the candidate’s skin tone either lighter or darker than it was in the original photograph. Participants whose partisanship matched that of the candidate they were evaluating consistently rated the lightened photographs as more representative of the candidate than the darkened photographs, hereas participants whose partisanship did not match that of the candidate showed the opposite pattern. For evaluations of Barack Obama, the extent to which people rated lightened photographs as representative of him was positively correlated with their stated voting intentions and reported voting behavior in the 2008 Presidential election. This effect persisted when controlling for political ideology and racial attitudes. These results suggest that people’s visual representations of others are related to their own preexisting beliefs and to the decisions they make in a consequential context.
Read the entire article here.