Racial Categorization of and Decision-Making Responses to Ambiguous and Unambiguous Facial Stimuli: An Examination of Racial Profiling Processes

Categorization and decision-making were combined in a task with photorealistic faces to test for the presence of racial profiling processes. Participants were asked to make a racial categorization and a decision about whether and for which type of crime to apprehend the target face. Results indicated that participants did engage in racial profiling behaviors, and did so of African Americans and European Americans at statistically indistinguishable rates. In addition, results indicated that crime decision-making was dependent on racial categorization and participants made race categorizations before deciding crime apprehension, even when the order of judgments required a crime decision prior to a race categorization. Additional findings were that ambiguous-race faces were not racially profiled, and also that these faces were twice as likely to be categorized as African American.