Whether or not this type of (subtle) manipulation actually suffices to swing people's decisions for something as important as an electoral vote is questionable (it did not seem to have worked for Hillary), yet it seems plausible enough that the combination of negative stereotypes against dark skinned people, the perception of someone being particularly dark, and our political support for this person may be linked.
One very interesting way in which these three elements truly are linked, may be somewhat different, however, from what you expected: As reported in this weeks' Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), the degree to which you support a political candidate may influence how dark you perceive this candidate's skin tone to be.
The theoretical foundation that underlies the PNAS study builds on peoples' tendency to make their perceptions match their intuition and preferred choices (a line of research I am very involved in), as well as the human tendency to categorize and group people (and objects) and project desirable properties to the categories one considers as one's own group.
For example, social psychological research indicates that
"group membership affects conscious and unconscious reactions toward in-group and out-group members, and impacts both social judgments of others and visual perception of their physical features."
However, the strength of these tendencies to impact our choices - so experiments tell us - depends to a large extent on the ambiguity involved in the decision to be made. Highly ambiguous information is more readily molded in our minds into what we would like it to mean (sounds familiar?), while unequivocal information puts us more on the spot about seeing things the way they really are.
And as a consequence we often find that,
"The influence of group membership on social judgment and visual perception is stronger when the information under consideration is ambiguous"
Which is exactly why Barack Obama's candidacy in 2008 provided a terrific research environment to investigate whether political partisanship (i.e. the degree to which Barack Obama is considered to belong to one's "in-group") may be directly related to how dark one perceives him to be.
The experiment is rather clever: Participants were shown three pictures of Barack Obama, like those shown in this post. One of the pictures is manipulated to make him appear slightly more light skinned, while another is manipulated to show the current President as more dark skinned.
Which one of the pictures was manipulated differed randomly across participants, who were each asked to rate the pictures according to how representative they thought each picture was of then-candidate Barack Obama.
The hypothesis under consideration, suggested that participants who supported Barack Obama (and stated intentions of voting for him) would rate the lighter picture as more representative, while those participants who intended not to vote for B.H. Obama would consider the darkened picture as more representative.
The results are shown in the following table:
The above results (and those from two other experiments conducted for the PNAS study) suggest that
"partisans not only ‘‘darken'' those with whom they disagree, but also ‘‘lighten'' those with whom they agree."
Because the study included mostly white participants, no Black-White comparisons for this effect are possible, but even in the absence of this, the study is a fine reminder that what we think about the world and others has an enormous influence on the sense perception we eventually arrive at.
Main Reference:
Caruso EM, Mead NL, & Balcetis E (2009). Political partisanship influences perception of biracial candidates' skin tone. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America PMID: 19934033...
Caruso EM, Mead NL, & Balcetis E. (2009) Political partisanship influences perception of biracial candidates' skin tone. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. PMID: 19934033 Political partisanship influences perception of biracial candidates' skin tone.
Comments
101 days ago
thanks for linking to the article, but in future it would be great if you didn't copy-paste the entire post, but rather only an excerpt with link to the original source. Please correct this.
Thanks,
Daniel Hawes