For immediate release:
Racial blends - easy on
the eyes until you categorise
New light has been
shed on how our minds judge multi-racial individuals, thanks
to a collaborative research project between the University
of Otago and the University of California, San
Diego.
Professor Jamin Halberstadt, from Otago's
Department of Psychology, and his colleague Professor Piotr
Winkielman, from UC San Diego, say their studies used
blended faces made up from two individuals, one Chinese and
one Caucasian.
"Previous research has shown that blended
faces, regardless of race, are more usually more attractive
than the original faces that go into the blend,”
Halberstadt explains.
"This blending effect is
especially evident for cross-race blends, so if you take two
people of different races and blend them together then you
get a face that is more attractive than the originals. Also,
that blend is more attractive than a blend of two faces from
the same race."
"Our idea was that these effects might be
explainable by 'processing fluency' - how easy it is to
perceive, process, and categorise something. Blended faces
are ‘easier on the eyes,’ because they are very
'face-like', and this ease creates a positive feeling toward
them."
The problem comes when people start viewing racial
face blends as not just 'faces' but rather as examples of
their racial groups. In that case, the faces should seem
relatively ambiguous, and that ambiguity should translate
into negative attitudes.
Halberstadt and Winkielman say
their most recently published research, in the Journal
of Experimental Social Psychology, asked participants to
first categorise a person's racial group and then judge
their attractiveness. They compared the judgments to those
of control participants who simply rated the facial blends
on their attractiveness without classifying them.
They
found that control participants preferred mixed-race faces
to single-race faces, but participants who had to first
decide if a face was Chinese or Caucasian, judged the mixed
race faces to be relatively unattractive.
In a parallel
experiment they used electromyography (EMG) to measure
facial expressions and found that people were less inclined
to smile at the faces presented to them if they had to
categorise them first.
Professor Halberstadt says it
appears that a blend is attractive as long as you do not
have to think about where it came from.
"It comes back to
fluency - how easy things are to process in your mind," he
says. "When you think of multi-racial individuals as
examples of humans they are more appealing because they
better capture your overall experience of life. But when you
think of them as examples of their racial groups then they
become more ambiguous and that ambiguity pulls down their
appeal."
ENDS