All Things Considered

Study: Political Bent Affects How We View Skin Tone

Published November 23, 2009 2:50 PM

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A new study suggests that people's political views may affect how they perceive President Obama's skin tone, with liberals tending to "lighten" his skin and conservatives tending to "darken" it.

"Our beliefs, you know, in this case our political beliefs, can really have pretty profound effects on how we see the world," says Eugene Caruso, a researcher at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. "Our data suggest that people's beliefs affect how light or dark they perceive someone to be."

Caruso has long been interested in how people's social perspectives can affect they way they view things like facts and figures. He recently decided to see how people's political beliefs might also change how they perceive the skin tone of a biracial political candidate.

Testing Perceptions

He and his colleagues took different photos of then-candidate Obama and digitally manipulated them to alter just the areas of exposed skin. "So we sort of isolated the head and the hands of Obama and altered the skin tone to make it relatively lighter in tone or relatively darker in tone," Caruso says.

The research team then showed the altered photos, plus the unaltered ones, one at a time to undergraduate students and asked them to rate the photos in terms of how representative they thought each photo was of the candidate. They researchers also questioned the students about their political views.

Liberal participants were most likely to rate a lightened photo of Obama as being most representative of him, while conservatives were most likely to say that about a photo that had been darkened, according to their findings published in a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Perceived Lightness Tied To Votes

What's more, the researchers found that the degree to which someone saw a lightened photo as being representative of Obama was related to whether he voted for him a week later.

That was true even after the researchers controlled for political views and measures of bias against blacks, says Caruso. "Assuming that people had equal levels of political conservativism," he says, "the extent to which you rated the lightened photos as more representative was, over and above your ideology, also predictive of your voting intentions and your voting behavior."

The researchers also showed students digitally lightened and darkened photos of John McCain but did not find that political affiliation affected people's ratings of the photos.

The study's result "goes along with sort of these cultural ideas that we have about things that are light versus things that are dark as being either good or bad, positive or negative," says Keith Maddox, a psychology researcher at Tufts University who has studied how people perceive skin tone.

He says whether or not you agree with someone's political views apparently "can sort of change the way you perceive them, in a real physical sense."

He says it would be interesting to do a similar study with a conservative biracial candidate, to see if liberals would then "darken" the candidate and conservatives would "lighten" that same person.

Judging Unknown Candidates By Skin Color, Too

Caruso also says he recently has been looking to see if skin tone can affect people's level of support for a novel biracial candidate when people's political affiliation with that candidate is ambiguous.

In one new study, his team used altered photos of a person described in the experiment as a candidate for a position with the Department of Education. People were shown either a darkened, lightened or unaltered photo of the fake candidate and then asked a few questions about their views on various issues facing the department.

All participants were told that the candidate agreed with them on half of the issues. But when asked if that candidate would get their support, says Caruso, "lo and behold, those who saw a photo with darkened skin accompanying the candidate's biography just a few minutes earlier reported that they were less likely to vote for this candidate."

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View Transcript

MICHELE NORRIS, host:

There's an old expression: Seeing is to believing. Well, sometimes, what you believe can affect what you see. For example, skin color. According to a new study, you will see a biracial political candidate's skin as lighter or darker depending on whether or not you agree with his or her beliefs.

NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce reports.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: Eugene Caruso is a researcher at the University of Chicago. He recently asked: Do people's political beliefs affect how they perceive a candidate's skin tone?

Professor EUGENE CARUSO (Researcher, University of Chicago): And I guess, sort of being a social psychologist, I felt compelled to do at least one study with Barack Obama, given all the interest surrounding, you know, his campaign.

GREENFIELDBOYCE: He and two colleagues took existing photos of then-candidate Obama and digitally manipulated the parts of the photos that showed exposed skin.

Prof. CARUSO: So we sort of isolated the head and the hands of Obama and altered the skin tone to make it relatively lighter in tone, or relatively darker in tone.

GREENFIELDBOYCE: Then they showed the altered and unaltered photos one at a time to about 200 university students.

Prof. CARUSO: And essentially, we asked them to rate how well each of these photos represents who Obama really is.

GREENFIELDBOYCE: The students were also asked about their political beliefs and whether they saw themselves as liberals or conservatives. Here's what the researchers found.

Prof. CARUSO: Participants whose partisanship matched that of the candidate they were evaluating, so, say, liberals evaluating Barack Obama in this case consistently rated the lightened photographs as more representative of who he really was than the darkened photograph.

GREENFIELDBOYCE: People who disagreed with the candidate and held conservative views did the opposite.

Prof. CARUSO: That is, they rated the darkened photograph as more representative of who he really was, compared to the lightened photographs.

GREENFIELDBOYCE: Caruso says they didn't have a lot of non-white students judging the photos in this study, but their patterns tended to be the same.

Prof. CARUSO: And because we're basing our prediction on political party rather than racial identity, we sort of expect the results to hold somewhat independent of the participant's race.

GREENFIELDBOYCE: The results are reported in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Keith Maddox is a psychology researcher at Tufts University who studied the social meaning of skin tone. He says the findings go with long-held cultural prejudices about things that are light as being positive and things that are dark as being negative.

Professor KEITH MADDOX (Psychology Researcher, Tufts University): You know, we think about, you know, the guy wearing the black hat as the bad guy, and the guy wearing the white hat is the good guy. You know, there are all these different sorts of cultural associations like, you know, angel food cake and devil food cake. And so, that's one of the reasons I find it interesting in that it's this idea that, you know, that political affiliation or that association that you might have with somebody who agrees with you can sort of change the way you perceive them in a real, kind of a real physical sense.

GREENFIELDBOYCE: He says people know their existing beliefs influence how they respond to someone's ideas. But they might be surprised to learn that their beliefs can literally shape the way they see the person.

Prof. MADDOX: If the brain can bias the perception of, you know, an opinion, it can bias the perception of somebody that we think of as more concrete like the, you know, the apparent physical appearance of somebody.

GREENFIELDBOYCE: He says it would be interesting to do a similar experiment with a biracial candidate who's conservative. He says this study suggests it would be the liberals who would darken that candidate.

Nell Greenfieldboyce, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright National Public Radio.

Source: NPR