Perception

From an article in today’s Health Blog of the Wall Street Journal:

What you wear can influence how others view you — specifically what they perceive your race to be, a new study finds.

The findings show how stereotypes and prejudices play a powerful role in how we mentally categorize people, says Jon Freeman, lead author of the study and a doctoral candidate in psychology at Tufts University.

The researchers, a group of psychologists and sociologists from Tufts, Stanford University and University of California, Irvine, asked study participants to determine the race of computerized faces wearing high-status attire (a business suit) or low-status attire (a janitor’s jumpsuit). Faces viewed in high-status attire were more likely to be seen as white and faces viewed in low-status attire were likely to be seen as black.

Using a technique that tracked the movements of a computer mouse, the researchers recorded the trajectory of participants’ hand movements as they selected a racial category on a computer screen. When viewing racially ambiguous faces, they found participants were initially drawn to the race stereotypically associated with the style of dress even if they ultimately chose the opposite. So even if a participant decided a person wearing a business suit was black, the trajectory of the mouse revealed he or she was first drawn to the “white” option.

I appropriated (stole) the picture below from another website.

My source said that a sociologist also used this picture to analyze perception. Participants were asked to look at the picture for 30 seconds, then describe what they saw.

According to that article:

• Young men see a remarkable butt.  Only the most observant young men notice that the butt is crossing the street, and even fewer mention that she seems to be wearing thong underwear.
• Older men tend to see a respectable woman crossing the street.  A few will make some comment about her derriere, and even fewer will point out that she seems to crossing at a designated cross-walk.
• Half the women say they wonder why she ever left the house dressed like that, and the other half (mostly younger women) wonder where she bought that blouse.
• Only small children seem to notice that the taxi is being driven by a dog.