The effect of context on responses to racially ambiguous faces: changes in perception and evaluation.

Reactions to individuals who possess features associated with multiple racial groups may be particularly susceptible to external contextual influences, leading to meaningfully different racial perceptions and judgments in different situations. In the present study, we found that an extrinsic race-label cue not only changed evaluative associations activated by a racially ambiguous face, but also changed quickly occurring neural responses sensitive to racial perception. Behaviorally, prototypical Black faces and racially ambiguous faces labeled as Black activated more negative implicit associations than prototypical White faces and racially ambiguous faces labeled as White. Neurally, prototypical faces and racially ambiguous faces cued with the same race elicited similar responses. Specifically, prototypical Black and racially ambiguous faces labeled as Black elicited larger P200s but smaller N200s than prototypical White and racially ambiguous faces labeled as White. These results show that racial perception can be changed by an external cue and this, in turn, influences subsequent evaluative reactions.

Contextual Variation in Automatic Evaluative Bias to Racially-Ambiguous Faces.

Three studies examined the implicit evaluative associations activated by racially-ambiguous Black-White faces. In the context of both Black and White faces, Study 1 revealed a graded pattern of bias against racially-ambiguous faces that was weaker than the bias to Black faces but stronger than that to White faces. Study 2 showed that significant bias was present when racially-ambiguous faces appeared in the context of only White faces, but not in the context of only Black faces. Study 3 demonstrated that context produces perceptual contrast effects on racial-prototypicality judgments. Racially-ambiguous faces were perceived as more prototypically Black in a White-only than mixed-race context, and less prototypically Black in a Black-only context. Conversely, they were seen as more prototypically White in a Black-only than mixed context, and less prototypically White in a White-only context. The studies suggest that both race-related featural properties within a face (i.e., racial ambiguity) and external contextual factors affect automatic evaluative associations.