Prejudice Concerns and Race-Based Attentional Bias

Abstract

The present study used eyetracking methodology to assess whether individuals high in external motivation (EM) to appear nonprejudiced exhibit an early bias in visual attention toward Black faces indicative of social threat perception. Drawing on previous work examining visual attention to socially threatening stimuli, the authors predicted that high-EM participants, but not lower-EM participants, would initially look toward Black faces and then subsequently direct their attention away from these faces. Participants viewed pairs of images, some of which consisted of one White and one Black male face, while a desk-mounted eyetracking camera recorded their eye movements. Results showed that, as predicted, high-EM, but not lower-EM, individuals exhibited patterns of visual attention indicative of social threat perception.