Cognitive Roots of Racial Discrimination: Objectivization or Threat Perception ? Amélie Bret1, Brice Beffara1,2 & Martial Mermillod1 1LPNC, Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CNRS 2Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL)

ameliebret@gmail.com

01 Overview

Dehumanization is the fact to consider out-group members as less human. It exists 2 types of dehumanization: Mechanistic & Animalistic. Haslam, 2006 Racial discrimination is linked with conservatism (RWA) & social dominance orientation (SDO). Duckitt & Sibley, 2007 In humans, neutral faces are quickly detected compared to objects & threatening stimuli are detected faster than neutral stimuli. Cooper & Langton, 2006

It exists reaction time differences to detect a face between in-group and out-group faces with an ethnic detection instruction (in Caucasian, Asiatic, and Blacks faces). Chance & Goldstein, 1996

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Time

Training (8 trials)

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Questions (RWA + SDO)

Experiment (120 trials)

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Until response

Until response

03 Method

500ms

02 Current Study

06 References 04 Results 05 Conclusion

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RWA score N = 62 p = .034. 95% CI [0.17, 4.24] η2 = .057 The higher their RWA score, the slower participants detect North-African faces among objects compared to Caucasian faces. There were no links between reaction times and SDO.

Hypotheses

We assume that individuals with high RWA & SDO should be slower to detect a North-Af r ican face among neut ra l s t imul i compared to a Caucasian face among neutral stimuli.

Chance, J. E. & Goldstein, A.G. (1996). The other race effect and eyewitness identification. In S. L. Sporer, R. S. Malpass, & G. Koehnken (Eds.), Psychological Issues in Eyewitness Identification (pp. 153-176). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Cooper, R. M., & Langton, S. R. H. (2006). Attentional bias to angry faces using the dot-probe task? It depends when you look for it. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 44(9), 1321–1329. doi:10.1016/j.brat.2005.10.004 Duckitt, J., & Sibley, C. G. (2007). Right wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation and the dimensions of generalized prejudice. European Journal Of Personality, 21(2), 113-130. doi:10.1002/per.6 Haslam, N. (2006). Dehumanization: an integrative review. Personality and Social Psychology Review : An Official Journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc, 10(3), 252–264. doi:10.1207/s

There are reaction time differences to detect North-African faces compared to Caucas ian faces , depend ing on conservatism.

Those reaction time differences are observed without any ethnic cues before the perception.

It is more in favor to a mechanistic dehumanization of the out-group faces

One track of reshape is to increase the environment adaptation.

Face perception differences

Reaction time differences based on

RWA

Participants had to detect as fast and as accurate as they could if there was a face in the screen Participants were Caucasian