Intersectional Invisibility Hypothesis and Reverse Correlation

Honorable Mention Winner Consistent with the intersectional invisibility hypothesis that predicts members of multiple subordinate groups are metaphorically ‘invisible’ (Purdie-Vaughns & Eibach, 2008), only stereotyping of Black men is related to prejudice against Black people (Phills et al., 2017). However, previous research consisted of listing tasks and other introspective questionnaires that do not visualize people’s biases of different social groups. Internal mental representations visualize biases in social perception (Brinkman et al., 2017), as past research with ingroups and outgroups has shown (Dotsch et al., 2008). The current study investigates whether internal mental representations of Black people are more similar to internal mental representations of Black men or Black women. We hypothesized that internal mental representations of Black people are more similar to internal mental representations of Black men than Black women. During phase 1, participants completed three 125 trial forced-choice image classification tasks, each focused on Black people, Black man, or Black woman. Participants repeatedly selected which of two faces presented on a computer screen looked most like the target variable. Participant selections were combined to create classification images representing the mental representations of each category. We compare each classification image for their pixel luminance values, an analysis of overall noise selections. We found the average pixel luminance value for Black men and Black people to be correlated, but not Black women and Black people. These results will also impact the gendered nature of prejudice literature. In phase 2, we will have an independent sample judge the perceived race and gender of each image