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

人们对另一个种族的看法会显著影响他们的互动。华盛顿大学的Yuichi Shoda博士和他的同事有证据表明，这种种族观念往往是绝对的。也就是说，人们认为“种族”是白人、黑人、亚洲人等，而不是连续的变化。种族问题在2008年美国总统选举中变得十分突出。民主党候选人巴拉克·奥巴马被媒体定性为黑人和“混血”或“多种族”，因为他的母亲是欧洲血统，父亲是非洲血统。这些描述和对奥巴马的日益熟悉可能会潜在地影响人们对种族的看法。Shoda博士和他的团队假设，在接下来的四个月里，对种族分类的看法可能会以两种方式之一发生变化：(1)将奥巴马视为多种族的人将进一步扩大他们的种族分类范围，从黑人-白人的二元分类转向更连续的黑人-白人混合连续体；(2)认为奥巴马是黑人的人可能会改变他们对黑人的定义，将不那么以非洲为中心（即“白人”）的混血儿包括在内。通过一项反映人物识别错误模式的内隐分类任务，这些假设将得到检验，追踪2008年大选期间人们种族认知的可能变化。拟议中的研究还提供了一个独特的机会来评估人们对种族的直觉假设，以及一种新的方法来检查人们通过直觉对他人进行分类的过程。

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.