Political Bent Affects How We View Skin Tone

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Study: Political Bent Affects How We View Skin Tone
By Nell Greenfieldboyce

A new study suggests that people's political views may affect how they perceive President Obama's skin tone, with liberals tending to "lighten" his skin and conservatives tending to "darken" it.

"Our beliefs, you know, in this case our political beliefs, can really have pretty profound effects on how we see the world," says Eugene Caruso, a researcher at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. "Our data suggest that people's beliefs affect how light or dark they perceive someone to be."

Caruso has long been interested in how people's social perspectives can affect they way they view things like facts and figures. He recently decided to see how people's political beliefs might also change how they perceive the skin tone of a biracial political candidate.

Testing Perceptions

He and his colleagues took different photos of then-candidate Obama and digitally manipulated them to alter just the areas of exposed skin. "So we sort of isolated the head and the hands of Obama and altered the skin tone to make it relatively lighter in tone or relatively darker in tone," Caruso says.

The research team then showed the altered photos, plus the unaltered ones, one at a time to undergraduate students and asked them to rate the photos in terms of how representative they thought each photo was of the candidate. They researchers also questioned the students about their political views.

( keep reading. )

in the audio, the researcher admits to a lack of "non-white" participants, but hypothesizes much the same result.

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