Article

Social Psychological and

Personality Science
Implicit Attitude Generalization From Black 2015, Vol. 6(5) 544-550
ª The Author(s) 2015
Reprints and permission:
to Black–White Biracial Group Members sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1948550614567686
spps.sagepub.com

Jacqueline M. Chen1 and Kate A. Ratliff2

Abstract
We investigated whether Black–White biracial individuals are perceived as Black in the domain of evaluation. Previous research has
documented that White perceivers’ negative evaluation of one Black person leads to a negative implicit evaluation of another Black
person belonging to the same minimal group. We built upon this out-group transfer effect by investigating whether perceivers also
transferred negative implicit attitudes from one Black person to a novel Black–White biracial person. In three experiments,
participants learned about a Black individual who performed undesirable behaviors and were then introduced to a new group
member. White perceivers formed negative attitudes toward the original individual and transferred these attitudes to the new
group member if she was Black or Biracial, but not if she was White (Experiment 1) or Asian (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 demon-
strated that only White participants exhibited transfer to the new Black and Biracial group members; Black participants did not.

Keywords
multiracial person perception, implicit attitudes, out-group homogeneity

‘‘I self-identify as African American—that’s how I’m treated and
that’s how I’m viewed.’’
—Barack Obama, November 25, 2007
It is estimated that one in every five Americans will be multira-
cial by 2050, with the most common multiracial background
being Black–White (U.S. Census, 2010). In 2014, even the Pres-
ident of the United States is of mixed race heritage. Although it
is widely known that Obama is biracial, he is continually labeled
as our nation’s first Black president. By his own account, Obama
is perceived and treated as a Black man. Although by no means
conclusive, Obama’s assertion suggests that biracial individuals’
social experiences are similar to those of prototypical Black peo-
ple, including being the targets of prejudice and discrimination.
This research investigated whether biracial individuals are per-
ceived as Black in an important domain: evaluation. Specifi-
cally, we tested whether perceivers transfer negative implicit
attitudes toward prototypical Black individuals to Black–White
biracial individuals who belong to the same group.
Much of the extant research on perceptions of multiracial
people has focused on how perceivers categorize multiracial
individuals (e.g., Halberstadt, Sherman, & Sherman, 2011;
Ho, Sidanius, Levin, & Banaji, 2011; Peery & Bodenhausen,
2008). This topic is historically significant, due to past wide-
spread use and institutionalization of the one drop rule, which
specified that any person with one drop of Black blood should
be considered Black (Davis, 1991). The one drop rule is an
example of the categorization tendency called hypodescent,
in which a multiracial person is categorized according to his
or her socially subordinate racial group membership (Harris,
1964). Throughout U.S. history, hypodescent served to perpe-
tuate social injustices by enabling Whites to deny multiracials
basic human rights during slavery and access to public spaces
and institutions during segregation.
There is mixed evidence as to whether perceivers engage in
hypodescent when explicitly categorizing Black–White multi-
racial persons in the present day. On one hand, perceivers are
more likely to categorize Black–White multiracial people as
Black than as White (Ho et al., 2011; Peery & Bodenhausen,
2008) especially when they are motivated to protect the status
quo (Ho, Sidanius, Cuddy, & Banaji, 2013; Krosch, Berntsen,
Amodio, Jost, & Van Bavel, 2013). On the other hand, percei-
vers are more hesitant when categorizing Black–White multira-
cial people than when categorizing Black people (Freeman,
Pauker, Apfelbaum, & Ambady, 2010). In addition, perceivers,
particularly those with strong egalitarian values, consistently
categorize Black–White biracials as Multiracial as opposed to
Black (Chen & Hamilton, 2012; Chen, Moons, Gaither, Hamil-
ton, & Sherman, 2014; Peery & Bodenhausen, 2008, Experi-
ment 2). In sum, previous research has shown that sometimes
perceivers do not differentiate Black–White multiracial people
1
Department of Psychology and Social Behavior, University of California,
Irvine, CA, USA
2
Psychology Department, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA
Corresponding Author:
Jacqueline Chen, Psychology and Social Behavior, UC Irvine, Irvine, CA 92617,
USA.
Email: j.chen@uci.edu

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Chen and Ratliff
from Black people and that sometimes they do (see also Good,
Chavez, & Sanchez, 2010; Sanchez & Bonam, 2009), and there
is a clear need for additional research to determine the domains
in which the former or the latter is true.
This research provides an important extension of the litera-
ture on multiracial person perception by determining if percei-
vers treat Black–White individuals as if they are Black in the
domain of implicit evaluation. When perceivers learn about the
behaviors of one individual, they not only evaluate the person
based on those behaviors, but also transfer their implicit (but
not explicit) attitudes toward a new individual if they are mem-
bers of the same group (Ratliff & Nosek, 2008, 2011) or are
perceptually similar (Gawronski & Quinn, 2013). Implicit atti-
tude transfer occurs rapidly, unintentionally, and beneath con-
scious awareness (Crawford, Sherman, & Hamilton, 2002;
Hawkins & Ratliff, in press; Ratliff & Nosek, 2008).
Despite the robustness of implicit attitude transfer, there are
noteworthy asymmetries in how readily it occurs. Perceivers
are more likely to transfer negative than positive attitudes, and
they are more likely to transfer negative attitudes between
racial out-group members than in-group members (Ratliff &
Nosek, 2011). In this way, the negative actions of one racial
out-group member reflect poorly on all members of that race,
at least at the implicit level. Importantly, this implicit attitude
transfer effect can influence explicit, self-reported evaluations
as time passes (Ratliff & Nosek, 2008).
We investigated whether White perceivers’ and Black percei-
vers’ negative implicit attitudes toward one Black person transfer
to a person who is Black–White biracial. A series of predictions
were derived from previously documented mechanisms of impli-
cit attitude transfer: group membership (Ratliff & Nosek, 2008),
perceptual similarity (Gawronski & Quinn, 2013), and cate-
gorization (Ratliff & Nosek, 2011). First, perceivers form asso-
ciations between two targets who share membership within the
same social group, and this association facilitates attitude transfer.
Based on this account, both White and Black perceivers would
transfer attitudes from a Black person to another group member
regardless of their race. Second, perceivers readily transfer impli-
cit attitudes between targets who physically resemble one
another. Thus, to the extent that biracial faces are perceptually
similar to Black faces, both White and Black perceivers should
transfer implicit attitudes from Black to Biracial individuals.
Finally, attitudes transfer more readily between members of racial
out-groups than in-groups. Based on hypodescent (e.g., Peery &
Bodenhausen, 2008), we could expect that perceivers would con-
sider biracials to be Black and, consequently, that their implicit
attitudes would transfer from a Black person to a novel Black–
White biracial person. However, other research (e.g., Chen &
Hamilton, 2012; Freeman et al., 2010; Pauker et al., 2009) pro-
vides a basis for hypothesizing that neither Black nor White per-
ceivers view biracials as in-group members and therefore neither
group would transfer attitudes from a Black person to a novel
Black–White biracial person. We conducted three experiments
to test these competing possibilities. Experiments 1 and 2
recruited White perceivers and Experiment 3 recruited White and
Black perceivers.
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545
Experiment 1
In Experiment 1, we investigated whether White perceivers
transferred negative implicit attitudes from one Black individual
to a member of the same group who was either Black, Biracial,
or White. In addition to being the first investigation of implicit
evaluations of biracial people, this experiment was the first to
investigate attitude transfer across racial boundaries (i.e., from
Black to White). On the basis of shared group membership,
we would expect perceivers to transfer attitudes to the new per-
son regardless of race. On the basis of perceived similarity, we
would expect that perceivers would transfer attitudes to Black
and Biracial individuals but not to White individuals. Finally,
as explained previously, a categorization basis of attitude trans-
fer generated competing predictions.
Method
Participants
Participants were non-Hispanic, White, U.S. citizen volunteers at
the Project Implicit research website (https://implicit.harvard.edu).
Nine hundred and fifty-eight participants completed all of the study
materials (70% women, Mage ¼ 32.7 years, SD ¼ 13.9).
Materials
Attitude induction procedure. Participants viewed a series of 36
behaviors performed by Reemolap (the target person) and Vab-
benif (a contrast person for comparison purposes). Of the 24
behaviors performed by Reemolap, 4 were positive and 20
were negative; all 12 behaviors performed by Vabbenif were
neutral (see Ratliff & Nosek, 2010). A picture of the individual
accompanied the sentence describing his behavior. Reemolap
was always pictured as Black man and Vabbenif was always
pictured as a White man. The pictures were chosen at random
out of two photographs per category (from Peery & Bodenhau-
sen, 2008). Each picture–behavior pair appeared on a computer
screen for 3 seconds before moving to the next.
Introduction to new people. After reading about the two original
people, participants were given information about two new
people belonging to the same groups. The information distin-
guishing the new individuals was a picture (see Appendix) and
filler descriptions that were equally positive/negative, ensuring
that differences in evaluations of the new people could only be
a function of evaluations of the original people (as used by
Ratliff & Nosek, 2008, 2010).
We manipulated the race of the new people between sub-
jects in order to determine whether attitude transfer occurred
differently depending on her race. Bosaalap, who belonged to
the same group as the target person Reemolap, was either
Black, White, or Biracial. The computer chose a picture at ran-
dom out of two pictures per category (six pictures total). The
Black–White biracial faces were pictures of individuals with
one Black and one White parent, originally collected by Pau-
ker, Ambady, and Freeman (2013). A pretest confirmed that the
546
biracial faces were significantly more racially ambiguous than
the Black faces and White faces.
Ibbonif, who belonged to the same group as the comparison
person Vabbenif, was always White. Following the recommen-
dation of Ratliff and Nosek (2010), to help distinguish between
the original and new people, the original group members were
always men and the new group members were always women.
Implicit Association Test (IAT). The IAT (Greenwald, McGhee, &
Schwartz, 1998; Nosek, Greenwald, & Banaji, 2007) assessed
associations among two concept categories (Reemolap and Vab-
benif) and two evaluative attributes (good and bad) by requiring
that participants categorize stimulus items representing the four
categories as quickly as possible using two keys of a computer
keyboard. Participants used the ‘‘e’’ and ‘‘i’’ keys to classify
items one at a time into the corresponding superordinate cate-
gories identified on the right or left side of the screen. Partici-
pants were randomly assigned to complete either an Original
People (Reemolap/Vabbenif) IAT or a New People (Bosaalap/
Ibbonif) IAT. Stimuli representing the target categories included
the name of the individual and a picture of the individual’s face.
The IATs consisted of seven trial blocks following the rec-
ommendation of Nosek, Greenwald, and Banaji (2005). Anal-
ysis with the D algorithm (Greenwald, Nosek, & Banaji,
2003) had the following features: response latencies <400 ms
and >10,000 ms were removed, and trial latencies were calcu-
lated from the beginning of the trial until the time of a correct
response. In the Original People IAT, a positive D score indi-
cates a preference for Reemolap (the target person) relative
to Vabbenif (the comparison person); in the New People IAT,
a positive score indicates a preference for Bosaalap (the indi-
vidual in the same group as the target person) or Ibbonif (the
individual in the same group as the comparison person). The
split-half IAT reliabilities were aoriginal ¼ .63 and anew ¼
.66. Thirty-five of the 958 participants (3.7%) were dropped
from analyses for too high error rates (greater than 40% in a
single block or greater than 30% overall).
Procedure
After being randomly assigned to this study, participants viewed
the attitude induction procedure. Next, participants were intro-
duced to the New People. Then, participants were randomly
assigned to complete implicit evaluations measures about either
the Original People or the New People. Once participants initi-
ated the study session, they were no longer eligible to be
assigned to this study again on subsequent visits to the website.
Refer to Table 1 for a visualization of the study procedure.1
Data Analysis Strategy
Recall that the information presented about the two new people
was evaluatively equal, meaning that any implicit preference
for one new person over the other can only be attributed to the
information presented about the original people. Thus, attitude
transfer is demonstrated by showing that implicit evaluations of
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Social Psychological and Personality Science 6(5)
Table 1. Outline of Method and Procedure.
Step 1: Attitude Induction Procedure
Participants learn about two people; one is clearly negative
Original target: Reemolap Original contrast individual:
Black male Vabbenif
Negative behaviors White male
Member of Laapian Group Neutral behaviors
Member of Niffian Group
Step 2: Introduction to New People
Participants learn about two neutral new people
New target: Bosaalap
Exp. 1: Female; Black, White, or New contrast individual:
Multiracial Ibbonif
Exp. 2: Female; Black, Asian, or White female
Multiracial Member of Niffian Group
Exp. 3: Female; Black, or
Multiracial
Member of Laapian Group
Step 3: Dependent Measures
Participants complete implicit attitude measures
Original people or new people
Note. Between-subjects experimental manipulations are underlined.
the new people differ significantly from zero such that the new
member of Reemolap’s group is less positive than the new
member of Vabbenif’s group (Ratliff & Nosek, 2010). In the
Results section, we focus on implicit attitudes toward the new
individuals (attitude transfer) and include analyses of implicit
evaluations of the original people in the online supplementary
material (see Online Supplemental Material found at http://
spps.sagepub.com/supplemental).
Results and Discussion
The manipulation of the new person’s race had a significant
effect on implicit evaluations of the new people, F(2,441) ¼
7.55, p ¼ .001, Z2p ¼ .033. Specifically, there was evidence of
implicit attitude transfer when the new person was Black, M ¼
0.14, SD ¼ 0.47, t(162) ¼ 3.80, p ¼ .002, 95% CI: [0.21,
0.07], Cohen’s d ¼ 0.30, and when the new person was Bira-
cial, M ¼ 0.21, SD ¼ 0.42, t(160) ¼ 6.34, p < .0001, 95% CI:
[0.28, 0.14], d ¼ 0.50, but not when the new person was
White, M ¼ 0.005, SD ¼ 0.42, t(119) ¼ 0.13, p ¼ .90, 95%
CI: [0.01, 0.07], d ¼ 0.001. In sum, participants formed nega-
tive implicit attitudes toward one Black individual and, subse-
quently, these attitudes transferred to novel Black and Black–
White biracial people, but not to the novel White person.
These findings are consistent with perceptual similarity and
hypodescent bases of attitude transfer, but not with the group
membership basis of attitude transfer. In other words, a shared
group membership was not sufficient to facilitate attitude trans-
fer across racial boundaries from a Black person to a White per-
son. Further, these findings provide the first evidence that
White perceivers readily transfer negative implicit attitudes
from Black people to Black–White biracial people.
Chen and Ratliff
Although our findings are interpreted as evidence for atti-
tude transfer, an alternative explanation is that participants had
negative implicit attitudes toward Black and biracial people
irrespective of the experimental manipulation and procedure.
However, another well-powered study (N ¼ 969, 69.4%
women, Mage ¼ 32.8 years, SD ¼ 13.7) using the same set of
stimulus photos found no difference in participants’ implicit
attitudes toward new Black, Black–White, and White targets
when the original group member was positive, F(2, 454) ¼
0.90, p ¼ .41, Z2p ¼ .004. Further, evaluations of the new person
were not negative, which indicates that participants are not sim-
ply always more negative toward the new Black or Multiracial
individual. Therefore, our results are difficult to explain in
terms of preexisting implicit racial prejudice. This issue is also
addressed by Ratliff and Nosek (2011).
Another possible interpretation of Experiment 1 is that White
perceivers exhibited attitude transfer because they categorized
Black and Black–White biracial people as belonging to a general
‘‘non-White’’ out-group. Experiment 2 addressed this possibility.
Experiment 2
Experiment 2 investigated whether White perceivers would
transfer attitudes between non-White individuals regardless
of their specific minority group membership. Using the same
paradigm as Experiment 1, we manipulated the new person’s
race (Asian, Black, and Black–White biracial). We argue that
attitude transfer exhibited by participants in Experiment 1 was
consistent with perceptual similarity and hypodescent rather
than due to a general non-White out-group categorization.
Therefore, in Experiment 2, we hypothesized that participants’
negative implicit attitudes would transfer from the original
Black person to the new Black and biracial people, replicating
the results of Experiment 1, but not to the new Asian person.
Method
Participants
Participants were non-Hispanic, White, U.S. citizen volunteers
at Project Implicit who were randomly assigned to this study.
One thousand two hundred and sixty-nine participants com-
pleted all of the study materials (67% women, Mage ¼ 31.7
years, SD ¼ 14.1).
Materials and Procedure
All aspects of the experiment were identical to Experiment 1
except that the new group member was Black, Asian, or Bira-
cial. We used two prototypical Asian female photos (from
Chen & Hamilton, 2012; see Appendix), and the computer ran-
domly selected one to present to each participant in the Asian
condition. The split-half IAT reliabilities were aoriginal ¼ .68
and anew ¼ .67. Sixty-five of the 1,269 participants (5.1%)
were excluded for too high error rates (greater than 40% in a
single block or greater than 30% overall).
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547
Results and Discussion
The manipulation of the new target person’s race had a signifi-
cant effect on implicit evaluations of the new people, F(2,575) ¼
3.62, p ¼ .03, Z2p ¼ .012. IAT scores significantly differed from
zero when the new person was Black, M ¼ 0.13, SD ¼ 0.43,
t(176) ¼ 4.02, p < .0001, 95% CI: [0.07, 0.19], d ¼ 0.30, and
when the new person was Biracial, M ¼ 0.18, SD ¼ 0.43,
t(188) ¼ 5.75, p < .0001, 95% CI: [0.12, 0.24], d ¼ 0.42,
indicating that attitude transfer did occur. When the new person
was Asian, however, there was no attitude transfer, M ¼ 0.06,
SD ¼ 0.45, t(211) ¼ 1.93, p ¼ .054, 95% CI: [0.001, 0.12], d ¼
0.13, mirroring no attitude transfer when the new person was
White in Experiment 1.
Experiment 2 demonstrated that perceivers evaluated the
new Black and biracial targets in the same manner and that this
attitude transfer was not driven by non-White categorization.
Building on Experiment 1, these findings provide additional
evidence that White perceivers’ attitude transfer between Black
and biracial individuals was driven by perceptual similarity or
hypodescent.
Experiment 3
Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that White perceivers
transferred negative implicit attitudes from a Black person
to Black and Biracial individuals, but not to Asian or
White individuals. To determine whether these findings are
more consistent with perceptual similarity or categorization
bases of attitude transfer, we sought to determine whether
Black perceivers exhibited the same effects as White
perceivers.
Experiment 3 employed the attitude induction procedure
varying the new person’s race (Black or Biracial) and
recruited Black and White perceivers. Previous research
suggests that both Whites and non-Whites view Black–
White multiracial people as Black; however, this work does
not focus on Black perceivers specifically (Herman, 2010;
Ho et al., 2010). We reasoned that, if attitude transfer from
Black to biracial group members is driven by the objective
resemblance of Black and Biracial targets, then both Black
and White perceivers would exhibit Black to Biracial atti-
tude transfer. This account would be consistent with previ-
ous research demonstrating that subtle physical
resemblance is sufficient for attitude transfer even between
racial in-group members (Gawronski & Quinn, 2013;
Lewicki, 1985; Verosky & Todorov, 2010). However, if
Black and White perceivers categorize biracials as Black,
then they would exhibit different patterns of attitude trans-
fer. Because perceivers more readily transfer attitudes
between members of out-groups than members of in-
groups (Ratliff & Nosek, 2011), we would expect attitudes
to transfer from Black to Biracial individuals among White
perceivers (who are perceiving an out-group), but we would
not expect transfer among Black perceivers (who are per-
ceiving an in-group).
548
0.25
Preferece for Bosaalap (New
Group Member) Relative to
Ibbonif (Contrast Person)
0 for Black participants did not significantly differ from zero
-0.25
-0.5
Black Target Multiracial
Target
Black Participants
Figure 1. Experiment 3 implicit evaluations of the new person by the
new person’s race and participant race. Bars represent the standard
error around the mean.
Method
Participants
Participants were White and Black U.S. citizen volunteers at
Project Implicit who were randomly assigned to this study.
241 Black (73% women, Mage ¼ 35.6 years, SD ¼ 14.6) and
1,580 White (64% women, Mage ¼ 33.1 years, SD ¼ 14.1)
participants completed the study.
Materials and Procedure
All aspects of the experiment were identical to Experiment 1
except that the new group member was Black or Biracial (i.e.,
there was no White or Asian condition). The split-half IAT reli-
abilities were aoriginal ¼ .61 and anew ¼ .67. Fifty-eight of the
1,821 participants (3.2%) were dropped due to too high error rates
(greater than 40% in a single block or greater than 30% overall).
Results and Discussion
Given a priori predictions regarding differences by perceiver
race and uneven sample size (N’s ¼ 241 vs. 1,580), we report
the analyses separately by participant race (see Figure 1).
White Participants
There was no main effect of the race of the new target,
F(1,1524) ¼ 14.78, p ¼ .72, Z2p < .0001, indicating that implicit
attitudes did not transfer differently based on whether the new
individual was Black or Biracial, replicating Experiments 1 and
2. IAT scores significantly differed from zero when the new
person was Black, M ¼ 0.21, SD ¼ 0.43, t(393) ¼ 9.69,
p < .0001, 95% CI: [0.17, 0.25], d ¼ 0.49, and when the
new person was Biracial, M ¼ 0.22, SD ¼ 0.42, t(348) ¼
9.79, p < .0001, 95% CI: [0.18, 0.26], d ¼ 0.52. Thus,
White perceivers again transferred negative implicit attitudes
from the original Black person to the new people, and this
transfer was equally strong for the Black and Biracial people.
Black Participants
There was no main effect of new target race, F(1,218) ¼ 1.00,
p ¼ .32, Z2p ¼ .005, indicating that, as for White participants,
Social Psychological and Personality Science 6(5)
implicit attitudes did not transfer differently based on whether
the new individual was Black or Biracial. However, IAT scores
when the new person was Black, M ¼ 0.04, SD ¼ 0.43, t(45)
¼ 0.63, p ¼ .53, 95% CI: [0.09, 0.17], d ¼ 0.09, or when the
new person was Biracial, M ¼ 0.001, SD ¼ 0.47, t(66) ¼
0.002, p ¼ .99, 95% CI: [0.11, 0.11], d < 0.001. This indicates
Black Target Multiracial
Target that there was no implicit attitude transfer among Black parti-
White Participants cipants. Therefore, these results are consistent with a hypodes-
cent explanation of attitude transfer (i.e., that White and Black
perceivers categorized biracials as Black).
General Discussion
Three experiments investigated multiracial person perception
in the novel and important context of implicit evaluation.
White perceivers’ negative implicit attitudes transferred from
a Black group member to novel Black and biracial group mem-
bers, but not to White or Asian group members. Although min-
imal similarity, such as the same hair color, facilitates attitude
transfer between in-group members (Gawronski & Quinn,
2013; Ratliff & Nosek, 2008), and implicit attitude transfer is
generally uncontrollable (Hawkins & Ratliff, in press), Black
perceivers resisted implicit attitude transfer from one Black
individual to both Black and Biracial individuals. Therefore,
our findings are most consistent hypodescent, such that both
White and Black perceivers categorized biracials as Black, and
provide additional support for categorization as a process by
which implicit attitude transfer occurs between members of
racial out-groups.
Additional research is needed to conclusively document
the role of categorization in attitude transfer from Black
to biracial individuals. For example, future studies could
manipulate perceptual similarity via Afrocentric features
independent of race (e.g., Blair, Judd, Sadler, & Jenkins,
2002) to determine how much similarity versus categoriza-
tion contributes to implicit attitude transfer. It is certainly
possible that both similarity and categorization facilitate
transfer. In addition, although challenging, research on mul-
tiracial person perception needs a larger database of stimuli
to insure generalizability of findings, and our findings need
to be replicated using additional stimuli.
More research is also necessary to identify the moderators of
implicit attitude transfer. Our sample was composed of U.S.
citizens and our findings may be limited to populations in
which mixed race categories are not well-established. Blended
racial categories are institutionalized and perceived as legiti-
mate in other cultural contexts, such as in South Africa, where
Black–White multiracial people are considered to belong to a
different racial category, colored. As such, it is reasonable to
predict that South African perceivers would not exhibit
categorization-based implicit attitude transfer between Black
people and multiracial people.
Furthermore, the contrast between Black and White target
people in the first stage of the experiment may have introduced
a dichotomous racial context similar to the two-category
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Chen and Ratliff
contexts (i.e., Is this person White or Black?) in studies doc-
umenting hypodescent. Perhaps in more racially diverse
contexts (e.g., if the contrast person were Latino or Asian),
perceivers would be more likely to differentiate biracial
individuals from Black individuals and less likely to exhibit
implicit attitude transfer. Thus, our findings highlight the
nuances developing in the literature: that among White per-
ceivers, Black–White multiracial persons will be perceived
as Black for some outcomes (e.g., implicit attitude general-
ization) and differentiated from Black persons for other out-
comes (e.g., face recognition). It will be important for
researchers to develop a systematic understanding of multi-
racial person perception for a variety of consequential out-
comes (e.g., categorization, evaluation, and recognition)
and among diverse populations.
In sum, we have demonstrated that the negative actions of a
single Black person will affect White perceivers’ implicit atti-
tudes toward Black–White multiracial group members in a neg-
ative manner, extending our understanding of implicit attitude
transfer and the perception of multiracial individuals. These
findings also illustrate one mechanism by which White percei-
vers may form implicit prejudice against Black–White multira-
cial people. Given that implicit attitudes predict many forms of
behavior (e.g., Dovidio, Kawakami, & Gaertner, 2002) and
influence explicit attitudes over time (Gawronski & Bodenhau-
sen, 2006; Ratliff & Nosek, 2008), White perceivers with neg-
ative implicit attitudes toward Black people may also be
prejudiced toward and discriminate against multiracial
individuals.
Appendix
Example Stimuli
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549
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
Kate Ratliff is a consultant with Project Implicit, Inc., a non-profit
organization that includes in its mission ‘‘to develop and deliver
methods for investigating and applying phenomena of implicit social
cognition, including especially phenomena of implicit bias based on
age, race, gender or other factors.’’
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for
the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This
research was supported by a UC Davis Chancellor’s postdoctoral fel-
lowship to the first author and a grant from Project Implicit to the sec-
ond author. All data and study materials are publicly available at the
project page on the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/feuyj/).
Note
1. In all three experiments, participants also reported their explicit
attitudes toward the same targets about which they completed the
Implicit Association Test. The order of implicit and explicit mea-
sures was counterbalanced and did not influence the results. Expli-
cit attitude analyses for all three experiments are described in the
online supplementary material (see Online Supplemental Material
found at http://spps.sagepub.com/supplemental) and support previ-
ous findings that explicit attitudes do not transfer or transfer to a far
lesser extent than implicit attitudes. After the attitude measures,
participants also completed a measure of essentialist beliefs about
race as part of pilot testing for another line of research.
Supplemental Material
The online supplemental material is available at http://spps.sagepub.
com/supplemental.
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Author Biographies
Jacqueline Chen is an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Social
Behavior at the University of California, Irvine. She received her PhD
in Psychology from UC Santa Barbara, and was a Chancellor’s Post-
doctoral Fellow at UC Davis. Her research examines issues related to
social perception, diversity, and intergroup relations.
Kate A. Ratliff is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psy-
chology at the University of Florida and Director of Research and
Education at Project Implicit. Much of her research focuses on impli-
cit prejudice and stereotyping; she is also working with her graduate
students to understand the role of implicit attitudes in a wide variety
of domains such as romantic relationships, group identification, health
decision-making, environmental concerns, and moral reasoning.