On the influence of implicit race attitudes on explicit trustworthiness judgments: An investigation of the perceivers and targets' race and gender intersection

ABSTRACT

People judge strangers’ trustworthiness based on their facial appearance, but these judgments are biased. Biases towards Black individuals may stem from implicit pro-White attitudes. However, previous studies have not explored if these effects extend to different members within the same social group, like women instead of men, nor considered the role of the perceiver’s multiple social group memberships. Therefore, we investigated how the perceiver’s and target’s gender influence implicit and explicit biases in trustworthiness judgments of Black and White individuals. Our study included 309 participants, split between Black and White men and women, who completed trustworthiness judgment tasks and the Implicit Association Test (IAT). We found that implicit pro-White attitudes predicted trustworthiness disparities only for White individuals. Interestingly, implicit pro-White attitudes also correlated with explicit pro-men attitudes, but only among male participants. This study underscores the importance of considering multiple social group memberships when studying prejudice in trustworthiness judgments.

KEYWORDS:

• Trustworthiness judgments
• Social biases
• Intersectional approach
• Implicit attitudes
• Race disparity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Author’s contributions

AV, EOM, MLH, PR and MB conceived the studies. AV, EOM, MLH performed the analysis. AV, EOM, MLH, PR and MB wrote the manuscript. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

Data availability statement

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation.

Notes

1 We had access only to means and standard deviations already computed for each selected image. Participants recruited by the authors were 1,087. Gender: 552 females, 308 males and 227 did not report. Ethnicity: 516 White, 117 Asian, 74 Black, 72 biracial or multiracial, 57 Latinx, 18 other, and 233 did not report. The average age was 26.75 (SD = 10.54).

2 Four counterbalanced IATs with women faces were presented, however only one task was correctly developed. The other three included errors in the coding that did not follow what was asked to participants to do in the instructions.

Additional information

Funding

This research received the EASP Seedcorn grant from the European Association of Social Psychology.