Why are faces being used to represent the groups White and Black?
Instead of faces, in many experiments we have used names that are typical of Black and White Americans to represent the groups such as Tyrone, Malik, and Jamel to represent Black Americans and names like Scott, Ryan, and Geoff to represent White Americans. The difficulty with names in the case of the race tests is that they may not accurately represent the two groups especially for Black Americans, many of whom have traditional Anglo-Saxon names. It may also be said that uniquely Black names in the United States captures a particular sub-group among Black Americans, with unique stereotypes associated with that sub-group. To avoid any such interpretations of the test, we use faces to represent the two groups. In laboratory experiments that have had the same subjects do two Black-White IAT versions, one using faces of unknown people (Black and White) and the other using names, we have found that the results are quite similar for the two tests. Of course there are many ways to represent a
