Colorblindness Can Backfire

December 2006 - Recent studies reported in Psychological Science indicate that whites often avoid using race to describe other people, particularly when communicating with blacks. Researchers found that these efforts to appear colorblind and unprejudiced are counterproductive and can be associated with negative nonverbal behaviors.

Samuel R. Sommers, assistant professor of psychology in the School of Arts and Sciences at Tufts University said:

"Many whites seem to think that appearing colorblind - avoiding race during social interaction - is a good way to appear unbiased. Despite that perception that colorblindness may make a positive impression on others, our data suggests that it often backfires."

Samuel R. Sommers, Evan P. Apfelbaum, a Ph.D. candidate at Tufts, and Michael I. Norton from Harvard Business School together with additional researchers at Tufts and Massachusetts Institute of Technology investigated reluctance to acknowledge ability to categorize other people by race. A total of 57 white participants were asked either to complete a sorting exercise or to estimate their response to the task. Researchers analysed how quickly 24 photographs of black and white volunteers were characterized by race, gender, age, background color, hair color, facial expression, and facial hair.

Results showed that participants were quickest to categorize by background color, followed by gender and race. Conversely, when asked to estimate their responses, participants identified race, followed by age as likely to take the longest to determine.

Further research suggested that blacks and whites demonstrated comparable speed when categorizing photos by race but black participants' estimates of their ability to do so were more accurate.

Samuel Sommers commented:

"Whites sometimes deny the ease with which they can categorize others by race and they'll even avoid using race as a simple descriptor of someone else."

Researchers went on to examine the consequences of this reluctance to identify other people according to their race. Thirty white participants were randomly paired with a white or black partner who was part of the research team. Participants asked questions of their partner, using as few yes/no examples as possible, to identify a single face from a set of 32 photos using the same variables as the first study. Researchers found that race was less likely to be referred to when partners were black (64 per cent of the time) than when they were white (93 per cent of the time). The target photograph took longer to identify as a result and this also was associated with negative nonverbal behaviors.

Samuel Sommers added:

"When we showed independent coders video clips of questioners in the study without audio, they noted that the white participants who avoided talking about race with a black partner made less eye contact with their partners and appeared to be less friendly. By their nonverbal behavior alone, the whites who are trying to appear colorblind to impress their black partners ironically come across as distant and unfriendly."