Research
The Development of Social Biases
What role do nonverbal messages (e.g., indicating warmth and friendliness) communicated during interpersonal interactions play in spreading attitudes and prejudice? Previous work demonstrates that Americans are frequently exposed to negative nonverbal signals (e.g., a lack of warmth and friendliness) directed towards Black people in social interactions (Weisbuch et al., 2009), and that exposure to this kind of nonverbal bias leads to increased racial bias (Castelli et al., 2012; Castelli et al., 2008; Weisbuch et al., 2009; Willard et al., 2015). But if someone is exposed to negative nonverbal signals directed toward an unfamiliar individual—can that shape their attitudes, creating a bias against that individual?
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My work shows that exposure to nonverbal bias can actually create social biases among adults and children (e.g., Skinner, Meltzoff, & Olson, 2017; Skinner & Meltzoff, 2017; Skinner & Perry, 2019).
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Going beyond attitudes toward individuals, my work also examines the role of nonverbal signals in producing attitudes toward groups. My findings show that exposure to nonverbal bias directed toward an individual can result in generalized prejudice against an entire group of people (Skinner, Olson, & Meltzoff, 2019). For example, children and adults who observe positive nonverbal signals directed toward an individual of one fictitious "nationality" and negative nonverbal signals directed toward an individual of another fictitious "nationality," will subsequently favor people of the target of positive nonverbal signals nationality.
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These findings suggest that social bias and prejudice can be viewed as “contagious.” That is, exposure to subtle nonverbal messages from others can generate novel implicit and explicit biases. We have also found evidence that children who mimic biased nonverbal signals are more likely to show attitude contagion (Skinner, Osnaya, Patel, & Perry, 2019).
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My work underscores the notion that the actions we take (i.e., nonverbal signals) matter when it comes to spreading our attitudes and biases to others (especially children). Overall, this work provides evidence that nonverbal signals are a powerful vehicle for transmitting social attitudes and biases, which may play a critical role in the development of social biases starting from early childhood.
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In an effort to better understand the factors that contribute to the establishment of intergroup biases in childhood, and what can effectively reduce them, I conducted a systematic review of the literature. Our review and associated policy recommendations appeared in Social Issues and Policy Review (Skinner & Meltzoff, 2019).
Artist: Yazmon Ector (National Center for Institutional Diversity Art & Design Intern)
Activation of Social Biases
Emotions and Affective Experiences
Most people strive to appear to be non-biased, I examine what leads stereotypes and social biases to be expressed. Some of this work has forcused on the emotions that underly the activation of biases. For example, I sought to examine what leads to social bias against interracial couples (Skinner & Rae, 2018). Some of my findings, based on evidence from self-reports and electrophysiological responses, indicated that interracial romances can elicit disgust. I extended this work to examine the potential consequences of this bias – namely dehumanization of interracial couples. Results indicated that interracial couples are implicitly dehumanized (on the Implicit Association Test). Overall, this work provided evidence of the role of emotional responses in understanding and predicting social bias against interracial couples (Skinner & Hudac, 2016).
In another series of studies I examined the role of threat in support for policing policy reforms. Racial disparities in policing and recent high-profile incidents resulting in the deaths of Black men have ignited a national debate on policing policies. We examined the impact of perceived threat on support for reformed policing policies (Skinner & Haas, 2016). Across three studies we found correlational evidence that perceiving police officers as threatening predicts increased support for reformed policing practices (e.g., limiting the use of lethal force and matching police force demographics to those of the community). In contrast, perceiving Black men as threatening predicted reduced support for policing policy reform. Perceived threat also predicted willingness to sign a petition calling for police reform.
Contextual and Perceptual Factors
In other work I have examined the contextual factors that lead biases to be expressed. For example, in one study we investigated the impact of exposure to the general negative usage of the word gay (as a synonym for lame), finding that exposure to this usage of the word gay increased implicit anti-gay bias among college students (Nicolas & Skinner, 2012).
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In another another study I showed that the framing of President Obama (i.e., whether he is framed as a racial trailblazer) could predict the activation of implicit racial bias. We found that priming the historic importance of the election of President Obama increased implicit anti-Black bias among White people in the U.S. (Skinner & Cheadle, 2016). Consistent with my other findings in this line of work, I found that how potential targets of social bias are perceived (or in this case, framed) influenced the extent to which social biases were activated and expressed.
I have also examined how perceptions of social targets who could be perceived or categorized in multiple ways (e.g., mixed-race people) lead to the activation of social biases. For example, we looked at the role of appearance and ancestry information on race categorization and stereotyping of biracial individuals. The results indicated that although appearance and ancestry impacted race perceptions, only appearance (not ancestry) impacted stereotyping and social evaluations (Skinner & Nicolas, 2015). We have also examined how mixed-race individuals are spontaneously stereotyped (Skinner, Perry, & Gaither, 2019) and categorized (Nicolas, Skinner, & Dickter, 2018). Our review of the race categorization literature more broadly can be found here (Nicolas & Skinner, 2017).