Prejudice and Prototypes: Understanding Mental Representations of Black Faces

Abstract

Substantial previous research has examined judgments of Black faces, while less research has investigated pre-existing mental representations of Black faces. This study examined the differences between White and Black people’s mental representations of Black faces and explored how implicit bias may influence these internal conceptions. The data-driven reverse correlation method was utilized to create visualizations (classification images) of participants’ mental representations of Black faces. Participants were split into low, moderate, and high bias subgroups within their racial groups based on difference scores from an Implicit Association Test (IAT) measuring implicit anti-Black bias. Then, the group-level and subgroup-level classification images were rated by a new set of participants on a variety of target traits. The results suggest that Whites and Blacks have fundamentally different mental representations of Black faces, as White participants generated classification images of Black faces that were perceived as more threatening, less competent, less attractive, and darker in skin tone than Black participants. Implicit anti-Black bias impacted participants’ mental representations of Black faces in a less distinguishable pattern than previous findings on implicit bias and mental representations. Potential reasons for these findings and implications for future research are discussed.