What is Afrocentricity? Representations of “Afrocentricity” Differ Across White and Black Faces
Under review
Collaborator: Kurt Hugenberg
Abstract
In this work we aimed to understand what features perceivers use when judging facial Afrocentricity, challenging its present-day interpretation as a stable set of low-level perceptual features that people rely on when judging targets regardless of targets’ category membership. Participants in Study 1a (N = 198) and Study 1b (N = 192) rated either Black or White synthetic faces on their White-to-Black racial prototypicality, which allowed us to construct and compare computational models of Afrocentricity. There was clear feature overlap across models derived from Black faces and from White faces, but these models showed clear differences as well. Thus, people used somewhat overlapping but not identical templates of Afrocentricity when judging Black faces versus White faces. In Study 2 (N = 96), naïve participants rated the group-level models, which showed that the Afrocentricity models generated from Black faces included Black-stereotypic cues, such as masculinity and threat significantly more than the models generated from White faces. In other words, the social category of a target shapes which perceptual features are recruited to judge its physical category typicality. These findings have implications both for the measurement of Afrocentric features and for psychological theory on how Afrocentricity influences judgments.