This will be uncomfortable, so try to relax. Examining our
own race and gender stereotypes can be as pleasant as sitting in the dentist’s chair.
But for Kerri L. Johnson, Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at UCLA, discovering
awkward truths about people’s biases is an occupational hazard. Dr. Johnson investigates
how people use physical cues to categorize other people. Sometimes she even gets hate mail and
coverage by Rush Limbaugh.
At the Social Communication Lab at UCLA, Dr. Johnson and her social psychologist colleagues do things like asking students
to decide whether a point-light display figure is a man or woman and to categorize faces of different races as male, female,
gay or straight. They even have a program that analyzes the relative femininity
or masculinity of a person’s face. Despite
the ill-informed hate mail, the researchers persist, because understanding how
biases are formed is the first step to combating unfair stereotypes and
discrimination.
In one study, Dr. Johnson demonstrated that race is gendered.
For example, in the United States, there is overlap in stereotypes of Asians
and women (soft-spoken, shy, family-oriented), while the stereotypes about
Blacks overlap with stereotypes about men (dominant, athletic, competitive). The
same pattern surfaced when the researchers measured whether respondents were
more likely to misidentify the Asian men’s faces as female and Black women’s
faces as male. The faces in question were digitally created so that only the
race varied (see above). Sure enough, subjects more quickly and
more correctly identified the Black men and Asian women than the other way around, and
the respondents’ own race or gender did not seem to make a difference.
The Social Communication Lab runs dozens of similar
experiments, finding, for example, that even when information was limited to
just photos of faces, subjects were better than chance at categorizing the
person as “gay” or “straight.” And, as another angry-letter-provoking study demonstrated, categorizing someone, whether by race, gender or sexual
orientation, has implications for how we will interact with that person given
our own baggage and biases.
Yet it was a study of politicians and gender that achieved notoriety and misrepresentation by both Samantha Bee at the New
York Times and Rush Limbaugh. The conclusions of the study were that Republican
women in Congress had more stereotypical feminine facial features than did their
Democratic counterparts; and that uninformed observers were more likely to
identify the highly feminine women’s faces as Republican and the less feminine
ones as Democratic.
You can take a moment to learn about the methods used in
this unexpectedly controversial study,
and even start another uncomfortable discussion in the comments section here.
Please, just go easy on the hate mail.
Anya Malkov is an MPP candidate at the Harvard
Kennedy School, a WAPPP Cultural
Bridge Fellow, and an alumna of From Harvard Square
to the Oval Office.
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