Interpreting Aggression: Does Race Priming Influence the Interpretation of Interpersonal Conflict?

In recent years, there has been substantial evidence found that priming participants with Black faces has an influence on implicit bias towards Black men, specifically regarding criminal activity. In this study, participants (N = 300) were exposed to a prime (a picture of either White rioters or Black rioters) and then they watched a video, which depicted ambiguous cross-racial interaction; the participants then interpreted the video and took the Symbolic Racism scale. Independent-samples t tests showed that there were significant differences in video reactions between conditions. However, this difference was not the expected effect as hypothesized; the White server was accused of spilling the drink on purpose significantly more than the Black server. These results were not expected and may be attributed to the participants not fully paying attention or confounding variables (i.e., nonequivalent videos). In recent years, the subject of racism has been a frequent topic of discussion in the news media and on social networking sites. Events have transpired, such as police shootings of unarmed Black Americans and the subsequent riots, to bring the country’s focus to this subject. Due to this recent focus on the subject of racism, many people believed the situation to be new. However, history shows that racism had not ceased after the Civil Rights Movement and then resurfaced recently; rather, the idea of racism simply had a change in manifestation to a more modern form. This study examined the modern form racism that is most prevalent today. Racism has been studied for decades and therefore the literature on the subject is extensive. According to Henry and Sears (2009), racism is crystallized in one’s personality by voting age (18 years old) and increases throughout adulthood. There has been a shift from oldfashioned racism to symbolic racism. The majority of current racist behaviors are subtle and controlled mostly by the unconscious (Henry & Sears, 2002; McConahay & Hough, 1972; McConahay, Hardee, & Batts, 1981). This idea of symbolic racism has also been referred to as implicit bias, which is defined as, “bias in judgment and/or behavior that results from subtle cognitive processes that often operate at a level below conscious awareness and without intentional control” (Dovidio & Gaertner, 2000; Dovidio, Gaertner, Kawakami, & Hodson, 2002, p. 94). Discrimination against Blacks by police officers has been attributed to implicit bias caused by the stereotypes of young Black men that are prominent in the U.S. (Spencer, Charbonneau, & Glaser, 2016). In addition to the implicit bias, the current study also examined the use of priming to influence implicit bias. Priming is defined as, “the implicit memory effect in which exposure to a stimulus influences response to a later stimulus” (Meyer & Schvaneveldt, 1971, p. 231). In other words, priming involves briefly exposing an individual to a stimulus (e.g. a picture, a sound, etc.) and the stimulus unconsciously influences the individual’s response to a later stimulus. The effect can be used to influence racial bias. For instance, one may show participants a picture of a Black man and then ask them to rate a neutral picture (e.g. a symbol, a letter) as good or bad. The expectation would be that the prime of the Black man would cause the participant to rate the neutral picture as bad. In a recent study, researchers found that the appearance of faces of Black men influenced the misidentification of weapons (Todd, Thiem, & Neel, 2016). Also, changing the facial expression of the prime affected the identification of the weapons; for example, a happy Black face diminished the stereotyping, while an angry Black face increased the stereotyping (Kubota & Ito, 2014). Another example of priming influencing implicit bias involves showing angry Black faces and angry White faces; the results showed that individuals high in implicit bias would perceive the Black face as more threatening than the White face (Hugenberg & Bodenhausen, 2003). Also, seeing Black faces influences participants’ ability to spontaneously identify degraded images of crime-relevant objects (Eberhardt, Goff, Purdie, & Davies, 2004). Priming participants with the appearance of a Black face, especially one expressing anger, appears to generally have an influence on the participants’ tendency to show implicit bias and follow stereotypes. The appearance of an angry Black face garners an immediate fear response and causes the individual to consider the Black individual as a threat. This occurrence is attributed to the general stereotypes that regard Black individuals as aggressive and criminal. This effect is also being tested in this study by examining if exposure to Black or White people engaged in violent acts primes interpretation of a subsequent Black—White social interaction. This research tested the use of priming to influence the misinterpretation of aggression. The study began with a prime that the participants viewed. The prime was a picture and subsequent news story shown as fictional posts on the social media site Twitter.com; the picture depicted a group of young men standing on a police car and the text described the individuals as rioters. The participants saw one of two conditions: Black rioters or White rioters. Then, the participants viewed a video that depicted a social interaction for them to interpret. The video showed a server refilling a customer’s water at a dinner table, but then the server accidentally spills the water and the customer accuses him of doing it on purpose. The participants were shown one of two videos: White server/Black customer or Black server/White customer. Then, participants interpreted the video and then completed the Symbolic Racism scale. The purpose of this study was to expand the past findings that support the idea that implicit bias exists. The hypothesis of this study was that participants who viewed the Black prime, relative to the White prime, would be more likely to interpret the server’s actions negatively. Another hypothesis of this study was that participants who interpreted the Black server’s actions negatively would report higher scores on the Symbolic Racism scale.