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The focus of the present paper is to analyze the study titled “Prejudice and Perception: The Role of Automatic and Controlled Processes in Perceiving a Weapon” Although Payne (2001) used two experiments to undertake this study, much of the focus will be directed at experiment one.
Social Psychology and Priming
Social psychology has been defined in the literature as the branch of psychology that attempts to study the way in which the personality, mind-set, attitudes, feelings, motivations, thoughts, beliefs, and behavior of a person influence and are influenced by factors occurring within the social context (Hewstone, Stroebe, & Jonas, 2012). The reviewed article is at the core of the social psychology discipline by virtue of its association with the topics of prejudice and perception. These topics, according to Hewstone et al. (2012), have been used by social psychologists to illuminate how the processes of aggression, bias, and stereotyping occur within the social context.
Priming has been described in the literature as an implicit memory/cognitive consequence in which exposure to one stimulus often makes individuals respond to another stimulus either automatically or manually (Hewstone et al., 2012). A good example of priming entails people of Caucasian origin having a perception that Africans are a cursed race due to Western media images that portray the African continent within the contexts of poverty, disease, hunger and starvation.
Brief Description of the Study
Payne (2001) used a model entailing priming the sampled participants with Black and White faces with the view to examining the effect of racial cues and biases on the visual identification of weapons. Specifically, the study’s main focus was to present a new and theoretically fascinating approach to differentiating the automatic and controlled procedures at work when group stereotypes are triggered by investigating whether priming participants with Black versus White faces prejudices their reaction time or precision of recognizing a weapon.
Hypotheses and Methods
The first section of the study (experiment 1) aimed to test two hypotheses, namely (1) the sampled respondents would respond at a faster speed to weapons when they were primed by a Black face compared with a White face, and (2) the racial prime used in the experiment would apply its influence in the automatic estimation while leaving the controlled estimation unchanged (Payne, 2001). In methods, the first section of the study used a quantitative research approach and experimental research design to test the hypotheses described above. Data were collected through the use of a Lickert-type questionnaire and the design of the study entailed a “2 (prime race: Black vs. White) X 2 (target type: gun vs. tool) factorial design, with both factors manipulated within participants” (Payne, 2001, p. 183).
Results and Confounding Variable
The results of the study revealed that the respondents mistook tools for weapons more often with a Black Face than a White Face, that they identified tools more swiftly when primed with a White face compared to a Black face, and that the racial primes influenced the perceptual identification of guns at the automatic level as opposed to the controlled level (Payne, 2001). These findings proved that the formulated hypotheses were correct. A confounding variable in this study may include previous experiences the participants could have had with Black people.
Personal Reflection
At a personal level, I agree with the findings in their entirety based on the fact that other research studies have also concluded that racial and ethnic orientations systematically prejudice important visual judgments regarding other people based on their race, skin color and religion, among other variables. For example, Matthews and Levin (2012) used an experimental design to demonstrate how perception of value threat from Muslims heightened feelings of disgust among non-Muslim participants and a propensity to change behavior with the view to maintaining traditional Western values. Additionally, in America today, most individuals who are fond of wearing Muslim attires such as Hijabs are at a greater risk of being referred to as terrorists due to the priming effect.
References
Hewstone, M., Stroebe, W., & Jonas, K. (2012). An introduction to social psychology (5th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.
Matthews, M., & Levin, S. (2012). Testing a dual process model of prejudice: Assessment of group threat perceptions and emotions. Motivation & Emotion, 36(4), 564-574. Web.
Payne, B.K. (2001). Prejudice and perception: The role of automatic and controlled processes in perceiving a weapon. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(2), 181-192. Web.
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