An Exploration of Relationships Between Perceptual and Cognitive Racial Biases

People are often biased in how they evaluate characteristics of individuals different races. Some these biases perceptual: for example, the “race-lightness effect” demonstrates that grayscale photos at equivalent luminance values, faces black frequently judged to be darker than white individuals. Other cognitive: Implicit Association Test (IAT) and direct assessments racial attitudes demonstrate people hold both negative implicit explicit prejudices. Despite extensive literature on topics, no study has explored relationship between perceptual cognitive same a within-subjects design. In this experiment, relationships were 28 using three tasks: one task, deemed Race-Lightness Task (RLT), participants completed 2-interval forced-choice procedure where shown pairs (some with European features, some African features) asked judge whether second face was lighter or first. IAT measure their associations race positive/negative adjectives. Lastly, subjects answered series questions about groups. While results from RLT uncorrelated, significant correlation survey question systemic racism. These provide preliminary support independence perception cognition racially based tasks, insight into pervasive nature prejudice.