Article Implicit Attitude Generalization From Back to Black–White Biracial Group Members

We investigated whether Black–White biracial individuals are perceived as Black in the domain of evaluation. Previous research has documented thatWhite perceivers ’ negative evaluation of one Black person leads to a negative implicit evaluation of another Black person belonging to the same minimal group.We built upon this out-group transfer effect by investigating whether perceivers also transferred negative implicit attitudes from one Black person to a novel Black–White biracial person. In three experiments, participants learned about a Black individual who performed undesirable behaviors and were then introduced to a new group member. White perceivers formed negative attitudes toward the original individual and transferred these attitudes to the new group member if she was Black or Biracial, but not if she wasWhite (Experiment 1) or Asian (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 demon-strated that only White participants exhibited transfer to the new Black and Biracial group members; Black participants did not. Keywords multiracial person perception, implicit attitudes, out-group homogeneity ‘‘I self-identify as African American—that’s how I’m treated and that’s how I’m viewed.’’ —Barack Obama, November 25, 2007 It is estimated that one in every five Americans will be multira