SGER: The Effect of the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election on Implicit Race Categorization: A Short-Term Longitudinal Study

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People's perception of another's race can affect their interaction significantly. Dr. Yuichi Shoda of the University of Washington and his colleagues have evidence that this perception of race tends to be categorical. That is, people perceive "race" as White, Black, Asian, etc. but not as a continuum of variations. The issue of race has become quite salient during the 2008 U.S. Presidential elections. The Democratic candidate, Barack Obama, has been characterized by the media as both Black and as "mixed race" or "multi-racial" in that his mother is of European descent and his father is of African descent. It is possible that these portrayals and increased familiarity with Obama could potentially influence people's perception of race. Dr. Shoda and his team hypothesize that over the next four months, perceptions of racial categories may change in one of two ways: (1) people who see Obama as multiracial will further expand their racial category repertoire and shift away from black-white dichotomous categories toward a more continuous black-mixed-white continuum; and (2) people who see Obama as Black may shift their definitions of who is Black to include less Afrocentric (i.e., "Whiter") mixed-race individuals. Using an implicit categorization task reflecting patterns of errors in person recognition, these hypotheses will be tested, tracking the possible change in people's race perception during the 2008 election. The proposed research also provides a unique opportunity for assessing people's intuitive assumptions about race, as well as a new method for examining the processes through which people intuitively categorize other people.