Meeting Threats and Darkness in Slow Motion: The Effect of Racial Attitudes and Environmental Threat on Interracial Motion Perception

Abstract

Many environmental, social and internal cues go into our perception of threat. Such cues can also influence the speed at which we perceive encountering threats to be moving towards us. In the following experiment, Whites, non-Black minority and Black Princeton University students were placed in either threatening or nonthreatening environments and asked to rated the speed at which Black and White faces appeared to be moving towards them on a computer screen. Greater intergroup anxiety and environmental threat was associated with non-Blacks judging Black faces as moving more slowly, demonstrating the role of racial and environmental threat in interracial motion perception.