Beyond stereotypes: The complexity of attention to racial out-group faces

Abstract

The current paper seeks to integrate social and cognitive psychological literature to provide a multifaceted understanding of attention to race. Social psychological studies show that participants demonstrate attentional bias to racial out-group versus in-group faces. Most of this research utilizes White participants and examines the attentional bias to Black faces, concluding that threat stereotypes or negative racial attitudes underlie attentional bias. However, visual processing research demonstrates that various stimulus- and perceiver-driven processes impact attention, suggesting that mechanisms other than racial stereotypes may underlie race-based attention. We propose a framework of attention that accounts not only for direct influences of the stimulus and perceiver but also perceiver-stimulus interactions that emerge iteratively over time. We apply this framework to existing research on attention to race, elucidating various processes that can explain the attention to racial out-groups. We propose that our framework can account for attention to race more generally, beyond the oft-used Black versus White paradigm. We argue that mechanisms underlying attentional bias to race encompass complex factors beyond stereotypes and that our framework can account for stimulus, perceiver, and iterative processes that impact attention to race.