Basic and Applied Social Psychology

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Not Only Whites: Racial Priming Effect for Black

Faces in Black People

Luca Guido Valla, Francesco Bossi, Rossana Calì, Verity Fox, Samrah Imtiaz
Ali & Davide Rivolta

To cite this article: Luca Guido Valla, Francesco Bossi, Rossana Calì, Verity Fox, Samrah Imtiaz
Ali & Davide Rivolta (2018): Not Only Whites: Racial Priming Effect for Black Faces in Black
People, Basic and Applied Social Psychology, DOI: 10.1080/01973533.2018.1462185

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/01973533.2018.1462185

Published online: 22 Jun 2018.

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BASIC AND APPLIED SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
https://doi.org/10.1080/01973533.2018.1462185

Not Only Whites: Racial Priming Effect for Black Faces in Black People
Luca Guido Vallaa,b , Francesco Bossic,d, Rossana Cal
ıa, Verity Foxa, Samrah Imtiaz Alia and
Davide Rivoltaa,e
a
University of East London; bUniversity of Malta; cUniversity of Milan–Bicocca; dNeuroMI: Milan Center for Neuroscience; eUniversity of
Bari Aldo Moro

ABSTRACT
Black people are widely negatively stereotyped. The presence of unconscious stereotypes
can be effectively assessed with the administration of “racial priming tasks.” An ethnically
diverse group was subjected to a priming paradigm to test whether racial cues could bias
the identification of target objects. Participants were asked to categorize objects (either as
dangerous or nondangerous) after the presentation of Black/White faces as primes. Results
show that both Black and White participants were faster in categorizing dangerous objects
when primed with Black faces compared to the control condition (i.e., scrambled faces). One
possible explanation for this effect is that Black faces are generally associated with a feeling
of danger, which ultimately leads to faster responses.

Introduction a specific stereotype (i.e., the person is Black and Black

Stereotypes refer to a general inclination to place an
individual in categories according to some easily and
quickly identifiable characteristics (e.g., age, sex, ethnic
membership, nationality, occupation) and then to attri-
bute to the individual qualities that are believed to be
typical of the members of that category (Allport, 1958;
Tajfel, 1969). Over the last few decades, various studies
showed that stereotypes and social judgments are
assimilated to various social labels, such as socioeco-
nomic status (Darley & Gross, 1983), psychopathology
(Rosenhan, 1973), personality traits (Higgins, Rholes, &
Jones, 1977), and racial group membership (Sagar &
Schofield, 1980). For instance, one of the stereotypes
that mostly affects Black people is related to violence:
They are believed to commit a greater amount of crimes
and violent acts than White people (Smith & Alpert,
2007). For this reason, the concept of violence is more
accessible when viewing a Black than when viewing a
White acting in the same way (Bruner, 1957). In a sem-
inal work, Sagar and Schofield (1980) demonstrated
that, when presented with drawings of people perform-
ing ambiguous actions and asked to indicate the most
violent, participants judged the same action as more
aggressive when performed by a Black person compared
to when it was performed by a White person. This sug-
gests that just physical aspect has the capacity to activate
people are aggressive).
From a phenomenological perspective, visual per-
ception can be considered as an embodied (i.e., body
shape plays a role in perceiving the world), embedded
(i.e., perception is always situated in the environment),
and enactive (i.e., perception is not only an analysis of
physical characteristics but also a need for action) pro-
cess (Liccione et al., 2014; Merleau-Ponty, 1945),
which implies that what we perceive is defined by
what we can do (No€e, 2004). Particularly, face percep-
tion stands in a pattern of relational possibilities.
Stereotypes can be included in this “active pattern”
and, for that reason, influence perception. In line with
this theoretical position, a series of “New Look” stud-
ies, mainly carried out in the 1940s and 1950s,
attempted to test whether social elements could affect
visual perception. These studies found that people
often magnified the largeness of emotionally relevant
symbols from swastikas to dollar signs and more care-
fully judged the size of emotionally neutral symbols
(Bruner & Postman, 1948).
An effective way through which we can test the
presence of nonconscious racial behaviors/evaluations
is through the administration of “racial priming tasks,”
which assesses whether the short presentation of a
human face (e.g., White/Black) biases decisions (e.g.,

CONTACT Luca Guido Valla luca.valla@um.edu.mt Faculty of Media and Knowledge Sciences, University of Malta, Msida MSD 2080 Malta.
Color versions of one or more of the figures in the article can be found online at www.tandfonline.com/hbas.
ß 2018 Taylor & Francis
2 L. G. VALLA ET AL.
whether an object is dangerous). Mendelberg (2001)
provided an exhaustive description of racial priming:
White people are ambivalent toward racial issues and,
primarily, their considerations on this topic are impli-
cit and ambiguous. Racial priming is thus a good way
to investigate them. Previous evidence indicated that
primes depicting Black people lead participants to
negatively categorize targets in a forced choice task
(Fazio, Jackson, Dunton, & Williams, 1995). It has
been consistently shown that people automatically util-
ize implicit stereotypes that are unconsciously acti-
vated in the presence of a member of a specific group
(e.g., Banaji, Hardin, & Rothman, 1993; Devine, 1989).
According to Chen and Bargh (1997), physical features
(e.g., skin color) and stereotyped personality character-
istics of individuals belonging to a social group, when
taken together, contribute to create this typical auto-
matic perceptual process.
In the current study, we adopted a racial priming
task to test whether the categorization of objects is
faster after the presentation of Black faces (as compared
to White and scrambled faces). Previous evidence sug-
gests that primes with higher emotional (and cultural)
valence could lead to a greater amount of errors in the
process of the categorization of targeted stimuli and to
shorter reaction times (RTs; Chiao, Heck, Nakayama,
& Ambady, 2006). In fact, RTs were lower when White
participants categorized dangerous objects after they
were primed with Black faces (Eberhardt et al., 2004;
Payne, 2001; Todd, Thiem, & Neel, 2016). According to
Ofan et al. (2011), the augmented vigilance provoked
by primes may interfere with the ability to respond
effectively on the categorization task. There is, in fact,
evidence that White people quickly associate Black
faces with negative characteristics (Eberhardt et al.,
2004; Hugenberg & Bodenhausen, 2003). It still
remains unclear whether these effects, demonstrated in
White participants, hold for other races. This is why we
investigated, with a priming paradigm, whether the
rapid presentation of Black/White faces biased the cor-
rect categorization of dangerous and nondangerous
stimuli in White and Black participants. We hypothe-
sized that participants categorize the objects more
quickly once they have been primed using Black faces
as compared to White faces. We also expected this
effect to be stronger in White than Black participants.
Methods
Participants
Sixty-one individuals (age range ¼20–34 years, M age
¼27.4) participated in this study. Thirty-one were
White (16 female, 15 male) and 30 were Black (15
female, 15 male) individuals. Of those participants
who had been identified as Black, 90% were Black
British, 6.7% were Black African, and 3.3% were Black
American. Of those participants who had been identi-
fied as White, 80.7% were White British, 3.2% were
White American, and 16.1% were White European.
Each of them took part voluntarily with no incentive
to participate offered. All participants provided a writ-
ten information consent form before taking part in
the study.
Stimuli and task
Ten images were used as primes—four photographs of
White faces (two male, two female), four Black faces
(two male, two female), and two “scrambled” images.
All were Black and White images presented at
10  8.74 cm. Each face had a neutral expression, and
the pictures were cropped at the neck and had no
background. The photographs were chosen so that
faces were matched according to age and perceived
attractiveness (as evaluated based on the response of
10 individuals) and had no distinctive features such as
tattoos or piercings. The scrambled images were ovals
of a regular jumbled pattern in black and white and
had the same dimension as the faces. Target stimuli
included 10 photographs of dangerous objects (two
bombs, two barbed wire fences, two guns, two knives,
and two tanks) and 10 photographs of nondangerous
objects (two apples, two cushions, two rubber ducks,
two teddies, and two flowers). The target images were
also in black and white and presented so that their
largest dimension (either height or width) was 10 cm
(Figure 1). Objects were selected if they could be
unambiguously identified as either dangerous or non-
dangerous by a group of 10 participants included in a
pilot phase of the study (these participants were not
later included in the actual study; Figure 1). The pri-
ming task was presented on a Toshiba laptop (13-in.
screen) using E-Prime 2.0 (Psychology Software Tools,
Inc., Pittsburgh, PA).
The experiment used a mixed factorial design with
three independent variables: one between-subjects fac-
tor with two levels (i.e., participant race: Black vs.
White) and two within-subjects factors, one with three
levels (i.e., prime race: Black vs. White vs. neutral)
and another with two levels (i.e., type of target object:
dangerous vs. nondangerous). Two dependent varia-
bles were examined: RTs in identifying objects as dan-
gerous or nondangerous and response accuracy. After
six practice trials, participants were randomly pre-
sented with 200 trials. On each trial a fixation cross

Figure 1. Examples of the stimuli used.
(500 ms) was followed by the prime face (250 ms) and
then by the target object, which remained in the cen-
ter of the screen until participants rated the object as
dangerous or nondangerous (by respectively pressing
the Z or M key; Figure 2). Every 50 trials, participants
were given the opportunity to take a short break. The
task, on average, took 10 min to complete.
Results
A mixed-effect linear model with prime (three levels
within-subjects factor: White vs. Black vs. scrambled
face), target (two levels within-subjects factor: danger-
ous vs. nondangerous), and participants’ race (two lev-
els between-subjects factor: White vs. Black) as
independent variables, and accuracy and the logarithm
of RTs as dependent variables, was carried out. The
intercept was set as a random effect varying across
participants. This model captures data dependency
due to the repeated measure design (Gallucci &
Leone, 2012). To explore the goodness of fit of this
statistical model, the R2 index was computed. This
index is used by default to easily extract Cohen’s f 2
and thus estimating the effect sizes in mixed models
(Selya et al., 2012). Two different R2 indices are usu-
ally estimated: the marginal R2 and the conditional R2
(Johnson, 2014; Nakagawa & Schielzeth, 2013). The
marginal R2 is estimated without considering random
effects and then tends to be lower, whereas the condi-
tional R2 also considers the variance captured by ran-
dom effects, resulting then higher.
Accuracy results (marginal R2 ¼ .10; conditional
R2 ¼ .29) showed a main effect of target objects
BASIC AND APPLIED SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 3
Figure 2. Trials structure. (A) Structure of the priming task,
showing the three conditions: Black face, White face, and
Scrambled face (control condition). (B) Examples of target
objects, which had to be categorized as “dangerous” or
“nondangerous.”
(marginal R2 ¼ .04; conditional R2 ¼ .03), where partic-
ipants were more accurate in categorizing nondanger-
ous objects (M ¼ .97) than dangerous objects (M
¼ .93; Figure 3). The main effect of participants’ race
(marginal R2 ¼ .04; conditional R2 < .01) showed that
White participants (M ¼ .97) were more accurate than
Black participants (M ¼ .93) in categorizing target
objects (irrespective of their dangerousness; Figure 4).
Results also showed a Prime  Race interaction (mar-
ginal R2 < .01; conditional R2 < .01), in which Black
participants were less accurate after the presentation
of Black faces as primes (M ¼ .93) than White partici-
pants (M¼ .98). Black participants, after the presenta-
tion of Black faces, were also less accurate than White
participants after the presentation of White faces
(M ¼ .97). The same pattern (Black participants less
accurate after the presentation of Black faces) occurred
in comparison to the performance of White partici-
pants after the presentation of scrambled faces
(M ¼ .97). Black participants were also less accurate
after the presentation of White faces (M¼ .93) than
White participants after the presentation of Black faces
(M ¼ .98).
RTs results (marginal R2 ¼ .01; conditional R2 ¼ .42)
showed a main effect of Prime (marginal R2 < .01;
conditional R2 ¼ .05), in which trials with scrambled
faces as prime (M ¼ 556 ms) had higher RTs than
those with White (M ¼ 542 ms) and Black
(M ¼ 545 ms) faces (Figure 5). There was a two-way
Prime  Target interaction (marginal R2 < .01;
4 L. G. VALLA ET AL.
Figure 3. Accuracy rates for target objects.
Figure 4. Accuracy rates for Black versus White participants.
conditional R ¼ .05). Results indicate that trials with
2
the combination of Black faces and dangerous targets
lead to lower RTs (M ¼ 539 ms) than the combination
of scrambled faces and dangerous targets (M ¼ 557)
Figure 5. Main effect of prime on reaction times (RTs).
Figure 6. Two-way interaction effect: Prime  Target. Note.
RT ¼ reaction times.
(Figure 6). This interaction effect resulted from a stat-
istical analysis comprising the results of both Black
and White participants; this implies that it is a wide-
spread effect and not race specific.
Discussion
By testing implicit stereotypes, priming tasks can be
adopted to investigate racial biases. We demonstrated
that both Black and White participants are faster in
categorizing an object as dangerous after being primed
by a Black face. Our results are consistent with

previous evidence highlighting the presence of stereo-
types associated with Black Americans (Eberhardt
et al., 2004; Payne, 2001; Todd et al., 2016). The cur-
rent study, by expanding this line of research, demon-
strated that Black people also show racial biases
toward other Black people.
As compared to previous research, the use of
scrambled faces as the control condition makes our
results more reliable. Furthermore, due to the greater
number of trials and participants, our findings can
also be considered more robust than previous evidence
(e.g., Payne, 2001). In line with the studies just men-
tioned, the present results demonstrate that stereo-
types affect the way through which objects are
detected. Nevertheless, we cannot accept our hypothe-
ses (i.e., faster categorization after Black faces than
after White faces, and stronger difference in White
participants) because the priming effect led to faster
responses only for “dangerous objects” and without
any distinctions in terms of the participants’ ethnicity.
Given the aforementioned, an appreciable element of
novelty of the present work resides in the recruitment
of people with different ethnic backgrounds. The
experimental protocol used in the present work is
similar to those used in the existing literature so that
the results can be easily compared.
Our findings have strong implications in terms of
personal and social security.
The following are some recent episodes, just to cite
a few, where racial priming could have played a key
role. Samuel DuBose, an unarmed Black man, was on
the receiving end of a fatal gunshot in Cincinnati,
Ohio. As proved by a dramatic body cam footage,
DuBose, after being asked to show his driver’s license
by a policeman, seems to reach for the ignition of his
car. During the following frantic moments, the fatal
gunshot can be heard. Philando Castile, a Black man,
did not survive a shooting by a police officer in
St. Anthony, Minnesota, after having informed him
that he had a licensed gun in his car, not even trying
to reach it. In North Charleston, South Carolina, a
police officer shot and killed Walter Scott, who was
trying to flee after being pulled over. In another inci-
dent, police officers apparently misinterpreted the
mobile phone of Stephon Clark, a 22-year-old Black
man from Sacramento, California, who was mortally
wounded when shot were fired at him.
Did the bias “Black person – dangerous object”
truly play a role? Were those officers prepared for
these unconscious triggers? Most important, why is
this bias “activated”? The current study sheds light
on a different way to think about what happened:
The unconscious, maybe intangible racial biases—
BASIC AND APPLIED SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 5
which this study demonstrated to exist—most likely
influenced the actions of the police officers. Far from
denying the legitimacy and importance of the con-
cerns and protests raised after these highly publicized
events, the bias indicated in this study offers an
alternative interpretation: If the officers behaved akin
to the average participant in our experiments, he or
she would not have been immune from the experi-
ence of an unconscious, uncontrollable bias. The
association “Black person – dangerous object” (e.g., a
gun) could have, at some level, influenced
their actions.
The aforementioned considerations have also been
proposed in the past (Payne, 2001). They hold not
only for people with different ethnic backgrounds
(which logically shifted the locus of the debate on
racial discrimination) but also for ingroup members.
Crucially, this confirms the automatic—not volun-
tary—nature of the process under investigation. On a
more speculative level, the responses given by Black
people could be read as a form of unconscious preju-
diced behavior toward other Black people, at least
when referring to an association with danger. Future
research should further analyze the topic by confirm-
ing or disproving the unmodifiable and uncontrollable
origin of the results in this study. If confirmed, the
results should stimulate the search for strategies to
mitigate automatic responses.
Our findings partially collide against some classical
theories, inter alia, the one proposed by Allport
(1954): The need to maintain positive attitudes and
good relationships among the members of the same
group, which could be based on socially driven
needs, seems not to be corroborated by the racial
priming effects, as they occurred also for members of
the same ethnic group. The cognitive automatic proc-
esses highlighted in this work show that ingroup and
outgroup attitudes toward the association of danger
with Black people seem to be the same. These results
provide affirmation of the strong influence of pre-
conceived ideas on social knowledge, regardless of
the ethnicity of the perceiver. As suggested by
Eberhardt (2004), “Stereotypic associations, in par-
ticular, have the capacity to critically alter visual
experience (p. 890).”
A potential limitation is that our study has been
carried out in a big metropolis (in this case, London),
thus recruiting participants with homogenized atti-
tudes and responses. Possible developments for future
research should take into consideration the recruit-
ment of people belonging to closed groups. Because
our experimental protocol does not provide any signal
detection analysis, we cannot definitively state that the
6 L. G. VALLA ET AL.
Black face primes affected participants’ categorization
skills rather than merely affecting their confidence at
categorizing objects. Another possible limitation can
be the lack of measurement of participants’ explicit
racial attitudes; this would have allowed better charac-
terization of the relationship between implicit and
explicit racial attitudes. As a matter of fact, the inter-
action of automatic biases created by racial cues vis-

a-vis subjective conscious judgments remains a topical
aim in the field of social cognition.
In summary, this article adds to the existing litera-
ture on racial priming (Chen & Bargh, 1997;
Eberhardt et al., 2004; Payne, 2001; Todd et al., 2016)
by suggesting that implicit biases commonly observed
for White people appear to affect Black people as well.
ORCID
Luca Guido Valla http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6905-4870
Davide Rivolta http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9969-9135
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