Does Seeing Faces of Young Black Boys Facilitate the Identification of Threatening Stimuli?
作者通过四个实验，研究了白人参与者看到黑人（包括5岁男孩）面孔后，是否更容易识别威胁性刺激（如武器），更难识别非威胁性刺激。实验采用序列启动任务，先短暂呈现不同种族（黑/白）和年龄（成人/儿童）的面孔，再让参与者对威胁或非威胁的物体/词语进行分类。结果一致显示，看到黑人面孔后，参与者识别威胁性刺激的反应更快、错误更少，识别非威胁性刺激则更慢、错误更多；这种种族偏见在成人面孔和儿童面孔中强度相同。过程分离分析表明，该效应完全由自动（无意识）的种族偏见驱动。结论是，通常与黑人男性关联的威胁感知可能泛化到年幼黑人男孩身上。
Pervasive stereotypes linking Black men with violence and criminality can lead to implicit cognitive biases, including the misidentification of harmless objects as weapons. In four experiments, we investigated whether these biases extend even to young Black boys (5-year-olds). White participants completed sequential priming tasks in which they categorized threatening and nonthreatening objects and words after brief presentations of faces of various races (Black and White) and ages (children and adults). Results consistently revealed that participants had less difficulty (i.e., faster response times, fewer errors) identifying threatening stimuli and more difficulty identifying nonthreatening stimuli after seeing Black faces than after seeing White faces, and this racial bias was equally strong following adult and child faces. Process-dissociation-procedure analyses further revealed that these effects were driven entirely by automatic (i.e., unintentional) racial biases. The collective findings suggest that the perceived threat commonly associated with Black men may generalize even to young Black boys.