Ambiguity in social categorization: The role of prejudice and facial affect in race categorization

ABSTRACT—Two studies tested the hypothesis that perceivers’ prejudice and targets ’ facial expressions bias race categoriza-tion in stereotypic directions. Specifically, we hypothesized that racial prejudice would be more strongly associated with a ten-dency to categorize hostile (but not happy) racially ambiguous faces as African American. We obtained support for this hy-pothesis using both a speeded dichotomous categorization task (Studies 1 and 2) and a rating-scale task (Study 2). Implicit prejudice (but not explicit prejudice) was related to increased sensitivity to the targets ’ facial expressions, regardless of wheth-er prejudice was measured after (Study 1) or before (Study 2) the race categorizations were made. Beginning with Darwin’s (1872/1965) seminal work, scholars have made an increasingly compelling argument that the human face has been shaped by selection pressures to serve as a medium of com-munication. The complex upper layer of facial musculature and its associated neural structures seem to communicate internal emotional states effortlessly, sometimes more clearly than one might wish (see Dimberg & Öhman, 1996). However, the vast and nuanced array of possible facial expressions may communicate more than just the tar-get’s emotional state. We argue that those selfsame expressions may also influence the social category to which a target is assigned. How a person is categorized is a matter of considerable con-sequence. If assigned to a negatively stereotyped category, an in-dividual may be subjected to discrimination in a variety of subtle o