Bias in the Flesh
Skin Complexion and Stereotype Consistency in Political Campaigns
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6367707 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Messing (0000-0002-0109-4040), Solomon Messing, Maria Jabon, Ethan Plaut (0000-0001-5333-0458) |
| Year | 2016 |
| Volume | 80 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 44-65 |
| Publication date | 2016-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Public Opinion Quarterly (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0033-362X • E-ISSN: 1537-5331 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1093/poq/nfv046 |
| PMID | 27257306 |
| OpenAlex | W2226784632 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 11 |
| References cited | 38 |
There is strong evidence linking skin complexion to negative stereotypes and adverse real-world outcomes. We extend these findings to political ad campaigns, in which skin complexion can be easily manipulated in ways that are difficult to detect. Devising a method to measure how dark a candidate appears in an image, this paper examines how complexion varied with ad content during the 2008 presidential election campaign (study 1). Findings show that darker images were more frequent in negative ads-especially those linking Obama to crime-which aired more frequently as Election Day approached. We then conduct an experiment to document how these darker images can activate stereotypes, and show that a subtle darkness manipulation is sufficient to activate the most negative stereotypes about Blacks-even when the candidate is a famous counter-stereotypical exemplar-Barack Obama (study 2). Further evidence of an evaluative penalty for darker skin comes from an observational study measuring affective responses to depictions of Obama with varying skin complexion, presented via the Affect Misattribution Procedure in the 2008 American National Election Study (study 3). This study demonstrates that darker images are used in a way that complements ad content, and shows that doing so can negatively affect how individuals evaluate candidates and think about politics
Affect (linguistics · Content (measure theory · Misattribution of memory · Political science · Politics · Presidential election · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Media, Gender, and Advertising · Psychology · Social and Intergroup Psychology · Law · Social Psychology
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A Measure of Tolerance
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Sexual orientation and vote choice
It Is All in the Eye of the Beholder
The Biat and the AMP as measures of racial prejudice in political science
The Persistence of Racial Cues and Appeals in American Elections
The Fluidity of Racial Classifications
Nonverbal Communication in Politics
Automatic Activation of Stereotypes
Skin Tone, Crime News, and Social Reality Judgments
The Influence of Afrocentric Facial Features in Criminal Sentencing
The Impact of Stereotypical Versus Counterstereotypical Media Exemplars on Racial Attitudes, Causal Attributions, and Support for Affirmative Action
Amazon's Mechanical Turk
The Reasoning Voter
A Continuum of Impression Formation, from Category-Based to Individuating Processes
Cognitive Representations of Black Americans
Looking Deathworthy
A validation of Amazon Mechanical Turk for the collection of acceptability judgments in linguistic theory
The Race Card
What moderates implicit—explicit consistency
Crime in Black and White
Sex stereotypes and implicit personality theory
Automaticity of social behavior
The Obama effect
The role of perceived negativity in the moderation of African Americans' implicit and explicit racial attitudes
Negativity in political perception
The Electoral Consequences of Skin Color
Evaluating Online Labor Markets for Experimental Research
When White Voters Evaluate Black Candidates
The trouble of thinking
The role of Afrocentric features in person perception
An inkblot for attitudes
Seeing Black
Stereotype threat and the intellectual test performance of African Americans
Neurocognitive underpinnings of face perception
Reactions to a Black professional
On the malleability of automatic attitudes
Replicating Experiments Using Aggregate and Survey Data
Cues that Matter
Does Attack Advertising Demobilize the Electorate
How Words and Money Cultivate a Personal Vote
| Unique citing works | 11 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1,1 |
| Citation span | 2016 - 2023 (8) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 11 |