Stereotypes Impacting Viewer's Choice of Ethnicity

In life there are always stereotypes. In high school alone there are many stereotypes that inevitably define who you are, and what you are capable of. One would have never thought though, that the very occupation you had would define what race people assumed you were. In a psychological trial at the Tufts University, Stanford University and the University of California it was proven that humans are more likely to assume faces accompanied by business attire as White, whereas faces accompanied by janitor attire as Black.

"Looking the part: Social status cues shape race perception" appears in PLoS ONE published online September 26. In the experiments studies show that just by the recipients hand trajectories they were more inclined to make a businessman White and a janitor Black. Although the person was capable in seeing that the person was Black or White, their hand gravitated towards Black for one occupation and White for another before clicking on the correct answer.

"The study shows how the perception of a face is always a compromise between the visual cues before our eyes and the baggage we bring to the table, like the stereotypes we hold," says the study's lead author, Jonathan B. Freeman, a doctoral candidate in psychology at the Tufts Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. The trial shows the underlying subtle and nearly unconscious racism that most people identify with.

Even in this day and age most people find it hard to believe that an African American can be a businessman or that a Caucasian can be a janitor. It is because of the past that one assumes to that a Caucasian man will always be superior to an African American man, however untrue it is. It is because of this hindered racism that one judges everyone based of off stereotypes. As Freeman says, "Racial stereotypes are powerful enough to trickle down to affect even basic visual processing of other people, systematically skewing the way we view our social world."