10.1177/0146167202250215 PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY BULLETIN Eberhardt et al. / RACIAL LABELS AND IMPLICIT BELIEFS Believing Is Seeing: The Effects of Racial Labels and Implicit Beliefs on Face Perception Jennifer L. Eberhardt Stanford University Nilanjana Dasgupta University of Massachusetts at Amherst Tracy L. Banaszynski Yale University Two studies tested whether racial category labels and lay beliefs about human traits have a combined effect on people’s percep- tion of, and memory for, racially ambiguous faces. Participants saw a morphed target face accompanied by a racial label (Black or White). Later, they were asked to identify the face from a set of two new morphed faces, one more Black and the other more White than the target. As predicted, entity theorists, who believe traits are immutable, perceived and remembered the target face as con- sistent with the racial label, whereas incremental theorists, who believe traits are malleable, perceived and remembered the face as inconsistent with the racial label. In Study 2, participants also drew the target face more consistently (entity theorists) or less con- sistently (incremental theorists) with the racial label. Results of both studies confirm that social variables can affect how physical features are seen and remembered. Keywords: racial labels; implicit beliefs; face perception Things are what they appear to be; they have just the qualities that they reveal to sight and touch. The sur- roundings open themselves to us directly and almost without deviation, as if we were face to face with objective reality. —Asch (1952, pp. 46-47) What could be as simple as seeing? Seeing is a skill that most people rely on heavily, trust deeply, and scarcely recognize as a skill at all. As Solomon Asch notes, lay peo- ple understand seeing as the passive perception of objec- tive reality. Yet, visual perception is considerably more complicated than this lay view suggests. Retinal images are inherently ambiguous and get resolved in ways most functional and meaningful to perceivers. Far from exposing perceivers to any one objective reality, percep- tion researchers for decades have recognized the process of visual perception as inherently subjective, construc- tive, and interpretive (Goldstein, 1999). Notwithstanding widespread scholarly recognition of the notion that visual perception is interpretive and sub- jective, contemporary social psychological research has failed to pursue the implications of that recognition. Social psychological research treats social perception as constructive and malleable yet accepts visual perception as an unquestioned given. Although person perception research has highlighted how individual and situational variables (e.g., attitudes, values, beliefs, and expectan- cies) shape how people are regarded and how their actions are interpreted (Allport & Postman, 1947; Darley & Gross, 1983; Kelley, 1950; Sagar & Schofield, 1980), the role of such variables in the perception of people’s physical features has been largely overlooked. Instead of 360 Authors’ Note: This work was supported by a Stanford University Dean’s Award (#1EQA077) to the first author. The authors wish to thank Melissa Williams, Ryan Swinney, Andrew Hastings, Darci Radloff- Riker, and Nathan Doty for providing wonderful research assistance. We also thank R. Richard Banks and several anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this article. Address correspondence concerning this article to Jennifer L. Eberhardt, De- partment of Psychology, Stanford University, Jordan Hall—Building 420, Stanford, CA 94305; e-mail: jle@psych.stanford.edu. PSPB, Vol. 29 No. 3, March 2003 360-370 DOI: 10.1177/0146167202250215 © 2003 by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc. at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on January 5, 2015 psp.sagepub.com Downloaded from