Dressed to Impress: Shifting the Perceivable Competence and Threat Evaluations of African American Men

Abstract

A history of oppression gives rise to harmful prejudices expressed in psychological responses, but perhaps those responses can be changed by stereotype disarming mechanisms such a clothing. The Stereotype Content Model (SCM) predicts that African Americans are generally perceived as having low competence and low warmth. Based on this idea, Oh, Shafir, and Todorov’s 2018 explored the effect of clothing type of measures of competence. paper that discovered that, despite the brevity if exposure to faces dressed in either “rich/business clothing” or “poor/casual clothing,” people ascribed the faces wearing rich clothing as more competent and the faces wearing poor clothing as less competent. This study finds that clothing is an indicator of competence. While Oh, Shafir, and Todorov’s 2018 paper established a connection between clothing, race, and competence, one key aspect of the SCM is missing—threat or a measure of warmth. This study added an additional measure of threat to Oh, Shafir, and Todorov’s 2018 experimental design. Based on previous findings and research, it is predicted that if clothing acts a disarming mechanism for Black male faces dressed in “rich” clothing should receive higher competence scores and reduced threat scores compared to Black faces paired with “poor” clothing. The results confirm a reduction in threat scores and an increase in competence scores for “rich” Black faces. Additionally, this study examined possible neural predictors that would further confirm the ability of clothing to act as a threat disarming effect for African American men.