Ethnic Out-Group Faces Are Biased in the Prejudiced Mind

Prejudice biases cognition, affect, and behavior toward ethnic out-groups. We propose that prejudice also biases the way people conceptualize the facial appearance of out-group members. Popular belief holds that people's personality traits are reflected in their facial features. We hypothesized that prejudiced people also have more negatively stereotyped mental representations of faces of people in the out-group. To test this hypothesis, we conducted two studies involving the category of Moroccans, a highly stigmatized immigrant group in The Netherlands. The results of the first study suggested that highly prejudiced people have biased mental representations of Moroccan faces. We ran a second study using more trials in the image construction phase, but with an otherwise identical design, to enhance the quality of individual participants' classification images. This allowed us to replicate the findings of the first study on an individual rather than subgroup level.