Why are faces being used to represent White and Black people?
In addition to faces, several experiments have used names to represent Black and White people. For example, names such as Tyrone, Malik, and Jamel have been used to represent Black Americans, and names such as Scott, Ryan, and Geoff have been used to represent White Americans. The difficulty with names is that they may not accurately represent the two groups (especially Black Americans, many of whom have traditional Anglo-Saxon names). For this reason, the Black-White IAT on this web site uses faces. In laboratory research on the Black-White IAT, the results have been similar regardless of whether the test uses names or unknown faces. Of course, there are many other ways to represent a group (e.g., by language, geography, cultural practices, and so on). Faces are an obvious choice because they are so easy to classify.
