The Unbearable Lightness of Agreeing.

Marc Ambinder points the way (or, did, but the post is down now) to a study (PDF) which concludes that when presented with a picture of a biracial candidate for a job, those who agree with his stated positions are more likely to view a lighter picture of him as an accurate representation of his appearance. Meanwhile, those who disagree with the candidate are more likely to view a darker skinned picture of him as more accurate.

lightdark

The study, which tests participants’ feelings about a novel biracial candidate and then Barack Obama, took place around the election last year, and noted voter intentions as part of the results.

Those who planned to vote for Obama thought the lighter picture of him was the most representative, and the authors write, “Our results suggest that voters themselves may alter how they see a racially ambiguous candidate, depending on their own level of support and their corresponding desire to see the candidate favorably.”

That is, instead of viewing a lighter skinned image of a person as ‘better’ due to media conditioning, people may be choosing all on their own to ‘lighten’ a candidate they like. This isn’t particularly surprising. (As I wrote about at TAPPED, racial prejudices and perceptions of skin color follow us everywhere, even into the virtual world.)

My first question — one that Ambinder didn’t ask, and one that wasn’t mentioned in the study results — was who were the participants? The results, which were actually tabulated from three separate studies, say that black people participated in two: they accounted for 3% of the participants in one, and 10% of participants in the other.

In the methodology, it’s noted that “we did not have enough Black participants to test reliably for differences between Black and White participants. Because we base our predictions on the participants’ political group membership (and not their race), we have not excluded any participants based on race in the results we report here. None of the results meaningfully changes when Black participants are excluded from the analyses.”

But wouldn’t the results have meaningfully changed if black participants had been included in the study in representative numbers? And if they didn’t, if black liberals lightened their preferred biracial candidate as well, then that would still be more interesting than another study on how white voters view black candidates.

Frankly, I suspect the lack of interest in the racial identity of the participants is due to an assumption that they were all white. But by excluding people of color in any meaningful way, and subsequently, the possible differentials, this study perpetuates the idea that whites are the sole arbiters of a biracial person’s political success — and that is deeply troubling.

Latest posts by Shani (see all)

  • I would love to know more about this, and whether’s there’s any correlation with how folks do on the race test at Project Implicit. I’m a white guy in, according to Project Implicit, the 25% of whites who have no preference or a preference for African Americans. I think the lightened picture of Obama looks ghastly. I voted for Obama, but my politics are far to the left of his, so, if the effect applies, either my preference for AA makes me like the darker pictures, or my dislike of his mainstream politics does. Hmm. Interesting study, even if it’s totally bogus.

  • “Because we base our predictions on the participants’ political group membership (and not their race), we have not excluded any participants based on race in the results we report here. None of the results meaningfully changes when Black participants are excluded from the analyses.””

    This seems really flawed. I’d think if you’d want to test identification patterns in political groups, you’d want to oversample for African-Americans given their disproportionate membership in the Democratic Party, just to have your participants’ political group membership be somewhat representative of actual political group membership. Especially considering historic black turnout in the ’08 election. I thought most *good* studies like this oversampled to get accurate proportions. With 0%, 3% and 10% participation of African-Americans (and what about Asians, Latin@s, etc.) they might as well title it about what white voters think.

  • Re: my comment left over at TAPPED, you should check out this article by Cecilia Ridgeway:

    http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=4Nmh4oTvErQC&oi=fnd&pg=PA265&dq=gender+Ridgeway&ots=RduNGhS7e0&sig=HPLCehqi2Cw6mHOKkj3-ixO1PfY#v=onepage&q=gender%20Ridgeway&f=false

    It totally lays out how inequality is reconstructed in new spheres. Very interesting.

  • -k-

    These are weird pictures- it just looks like the difference between someone standing in the sun/with flash on the ‘lightened’ end, and someone in the shade/shadow on the ‘darkened’, and the middle one in each case looks like it’s of higher quality. I wonder what someone who knows more than I do about these things would have to say about differences in body positioning, background, close-up vs far-away, etc.- not using the same photo in each case was to avoid tipping their hand, I guess?

  • Jessica

    Same comment as -k-, essentially. For example, does it make a difference that Obama’s arms are crossed over his chest in the darkened picture, or that he’s looking directly at the camera in that one? I haven’t read the study- maybe they account for that by switching which of the three photos is lightened or darkened for different study participants. If not, they should have.