presented in the last section, Eberhardt was also interested in the possibility that if people carry

presented in the last section, Eberhardt was also interested in the possibility that if people carry this association around in their head, they do so unconsciously, despite explicit avowals that they are not at all racist. And if they carry this association around unconsciously, how does it impact upon their judgments and actions? In one experiment with both Caucasian and non-Caucasian subjects, Eberhardt used a technique called subliminal priming. Subliminal priming involves rapidly presenting pictures, sounds or other experiences under the radar of awareness and then presenting material that falls within our radar. If the two experiences are similar, the unconscious version affects subjects’ perception of the conscious one. For example, if you first prime people by flashing the picture of a woman’s face, subjects then respond faster to faces of women than to faces of men. In other words, despite the fact that subjects are unaware of the prime, it affects their judgments. Eberhardt first primed subjects with photographed faces of Caucasian or Black people or an unrecognizable non-face. They then watched a short movie that started off with an unrecognizable object that looked like it was covered by dense snow. As the movie progressed, the snow lifted, making it easier to recognize the object as a line drawing of either a duck, dolphin, alligator, squirrel or ape. Subjects stopped the movie as soon as they recognized the animal. Compared with Caucasian faces and non-faces, priming with Black faces caused subjects to stop the movie much sooner for apes, but not for any other animal. Compared with non-faces, priming with Caucasian faces caused subjects to stop the movie much /ater for apes, but not for any other animal. This suggests that Black faces made it easier to identify apes, whereas Caucasian faces made it harder to identify apes, with no comparable effects for any other animals. Caucasian and non-Caucasian subjects showed the same pattern of response, and so too did individuals with and without strong, explicit racial attitudes. Although the similarity among Caucasian and non-Caucasian subjects is of interest, and suggests that the association is held even among those who were perhaps less strongly associated with this form of dehumanization, there were relatively few Black subjects in this non-Caucasian group. This first set of experiments suggests, therefore, that among a racially heterogeneous group of educated Stanford undergraduates, individuals carry an unconscious association between Black people and apes, and thus, an unconsciously dehumanized representation of another human being. Given the animal form of this dehumanization, the implication from Haslam’s work is that Caucasians associate Blacks with less rationality, civility, and self-control, in essence, less uniquely human qualities. These are remarkable and disturbing findings. They can’t be explained by some superficial similarity between human faces and animals because Eberhardt found the same results when she presented either line drawings or words of animals. Had Eberhardt used actual photographs of animals, subjects could have used similarity in skin color or nose shape — for example, seeing a black human face would prime seeing a black ape face because both have the color black in common. Line drawings and Hauser Chapter 3. Ravages of denial 102 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_012848