Article summary with Politics can influence the perception of biracial candidates’ skin tone by Caruso a.o. - 2009

The politics play a big role in our lives. Because of this, one decides in a deliberate and responsible manner on which political party or candidate one is going to vote. People vote for someone because of his/her political party, his/her thoughts on important issues and perceived competence. Since 2008 people of the United States also look at racial identity. This is because their president Obama is biracial. This article shows that political partisanship can change people’s visual representations of one’s biracial skin tone. These representations in their own turn have a connection to voting decisions.

People form groups and these groups make people form representations of reality. People view their group positively. Affiliation with a political party is a powerful group membership that shapes the way people interpret the world. Group membership can affect the way you look at the world and how you view ingroup and outgroup members. Also, social judgments and visual perceptions are affected by group membership. An example of this is that people’s expectations about the group to which racially ambiguous faces belong to can influence their perceptions of how dark or light these faces are. The influence on visual perception is stronger when the information is ambiguous. This study suggests that group membership biases the interpretation of somebody’s skin colour and that this is done to see one’s own group positively. Because White is usually associated with good and Black with bad, the researchers think that positive association with a candidate leads people to believe that lighter skin tone fits him/her more and that negative affiliation leads people to believe that darker skin tone fits him/her more.

In this research political partisanship was manipulated by telling a participant that a candidate did or did not support their own political views. This was done with photographs of hypothetical biracial candidates (Study 1). In study 2 and 3 political partisanship was measured by asking participants to report their political ideology. These studies were done with photographs of actual biracial candidates. There were a couple of photographs of the candidate in different poses and for every pose were three pictures of the candidate: the original, a darker version and a lighter version. The participants saw just one picture of every pose and researchers made sure that everybody saw one lighter, one original and one darker photograph. The participants had to rate which photograph was most representative of the political candidate.

The results support the hypothesis. When the candidate supported the participant’s view, the participant was more likely to rate a lightened photograph as most representative of the candidate. When participants thought that the candidate didn’t hold the same views, he or she was more likely to rate the darkened photograph as most representative of the candidate. Also, when the participants thought that the lightened photograph represented the candidate more, they were more likely to vote for him/her.

Study 2 tested if these results would also endure with a familiar political candidate. Pictures of Barack Obama were used. The same results were found: people who affiliated more with Obama were more likely to rate the lightened photograph as more fitting for him than people who didn’t affiliate with Obama. Those people were more likely to rate a darkened photograph as more fitting.

Study 3 researched if the effect of lightness perceptions would persist even when controlling for racial attitudes. The participants were measured on implicit and explicit prejudice. They found that liberals were more likely to rate the lightened photograph of Obama as more representative of him and that conservatives were more likely to rate the darkened photograph as most representative of Obama. The liberals were more likely to vote for him whereas conservatives were more likely to vote for McCain. So prejudicial attitudes did not bias perception of skin tone.