Using perceptions of trustworthiness and intelligence to predict candidate support

Includes bibliographical references (pages 29-34)The current research sought to examine the relationship between ethnicity and ratings of trustworthiness and intelligence. It also sought to examine the relationship between implicit and explicit perceptions of African American political candidates and willingness to support them. Previous studies have found implicit attitudes about race and ethnicity play a part in political elections even after taking into consideration other factors such as party affiliation, sex, and age. The 506 participants in this study were asked to complete two Implicit Association Tests (IATs) and one survey of candidate support. It was hypothesized that on average, participants would be significantly faster at pairing trustworthy and intelligent synonyms with White American faces compared to African American faces on the IAT. This hypothesis was fully supported. In addition, it was hypothesized that both implicit and explicit perceptions of trustworthiness and intelligence would significantly predict candidate support. This hypothesis was only practically supported. Although explicit ratings of trustworthiness and intelligence significantly predicted whether participants supported an African American candidate, no evidence was found that the implicit IAT scores predicted candidate support. It is believed that this finding was due to the lack of controls in the explicit ratings portion of the study. In order to gain a better understanding of the role of implicit stereotypes in candidate support, future studies will have to control for these extraneous variables and manipulate the candidates??? ethnicity. Limitations of the current study and implications for future research are discussed