Even people who support immigrants imagine their faces as untrustworthy and incompetent

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2024-07-25 04:00

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US scientists have laid bare our unconscious bias in a study which found that even Americans who support immigrants imagine their faces as untrustworthy and incompetent, compared with the faces of people they think are US citizens. The team first asked 217 people to 'use their gut instinct' to generate images of faces by deciding whether a blurry, degraded image of a face was an immigrant or a US citizen. They were then asked to rate them using 10 negative and 10 positive words, such as 'success' or 'failure'. Everyone was asked how 'warm' or 'cold' they felt towards different social groups to measure their attitudes toward immigrants. The images were then shown to 290 online participants, who rated them for competence, trustworthiness, or perceived race/ethnicity. The team found images of immigrants’ faces were judged as less trustworthy and less competent and were more likely to be categorised as a non-White race/ethnicity than the images of citizens’ faces. These authors say the findings suggest anti-immigrant sentiment and racial/ethnic assumptions characterise facial representations of US immigrants, even among people who feel positive about them.