EAPSI: Understanding How and Why Visual Exposure Reduces Prejudice

Lick David J, West Hollywood CA

Investigators

Abstract

Despite decades of research and applied efforts, prejudice continues to occur at epidemic rates around the globe, resulting in serious mental and physical health deficits for victims. Recent evidence suggests that repeated visual exposure to several members of a disadvantaged social group reduces prejudice against the group at large. However, the causal mechanisms driving this effect remain unclear. How and why does visual exposure reduce prejudice? Working in collaboration with a leading expert on the effects of visual exposure to human features (Dr. Gillian Rhodes; University of Western Australia), the funded project will test whether visual exposure reduces prejudice by enhancing the ease with which perceivers can process members of disadvantaged social groups. Perceptual ease is generally associated with favorable evaluations, so to the extent that visual exposure enhances perceptual ease, it should result in prejudice reduction. Data in support of these hypotheses will provide the first evidence for a causal mechanism by which visual exposure improves social evaluations, offering novel information that is crucial to the development of techniques aimed at reducing prejudice and its harmful consequences. The researcher will investigate perceptual fluency as a mechanism by which visual exposure reduces prejudice against disadvantaged groups. In recent years, scientists have documented two facts relevant to this topic: (1) visual adaptation molds preferences, such that repeated exposure to a given stimulus causes that stimulus to appear normative and subsequently enhances evaluative judgments of it, and (2) stimuli that are easy to process (perceptually fluent) tend to be evaluated more favorably than stimuli that are difficult to process (perceptually disfluent). Two studies aim to unite these observations by examining fluency as a proximal mechanism by which visual adaptation reduces prejudice. Study 1 will test whether visual adaptation to gender-atypical female faces enables perceivers to categorize the sex of those faces more easily, thereby enhancing evaluations of them. Study 2 will experimentally manipulate fluency by obstructing gender-atypical faces with visual noise, testing whether visual adaptation fails to enhance interpersonal evaluations of gender-atypical female faces that are intentionally made to be disfluent. Collectively, these studies will provide new information relevant to social psychological theories of impression formation, cognitive psychological theories of visual adaptation, and applied research aimed at prejudice reduction. Indeed, evidence that visual adaptation enhances evaluations of stigmatized social groups by increasing perceptual fluency would aid in the development of cost-effective interventions that reduce the widespread prevalence and harmful consequences of interpersonal bias. This NSF EAPSI award supports the research of a U.S. graduate student and is funded in collaboration with the Australian Academy of Science.