Beyond Black and White: The Differential Impact of Skin Tone and Racial Category Membership on Social Evaluation

The current studies investigated the relationship between bias based on skin tone and bias based on racial categorization. Across three studies (N = 1193), perceivers formed more favorable first impressions of faces with lighter versus darker skin tones, even in the absence of a categorical pro-White racial bias. This effect generalized across several outcome measures and across target gender. Further, racial bias and skin-tone bias displayed distinct relationships to participant-level individual differences. Specifically, a more conservative political ideology robustly predicted the magnitude of pro-White racial bias but did not tend to differentially predict favoritism shown toward relatively lighter-versus darker-skinned faces. A pooled analysis also showed that skin-tone bias was more pronounced among White than among Black perceivers. We conclude that race and skin tone can impart distinct biases in social perception and are differentially responsive to variables that might be expected to influence an individual's tendency to display racial bias.