Jennifer L. Eberhardt

Jennifer L. Eberhardt received a PhD in Psychology from Harvard University in 1993. Before coming to Stanford in 1998, she held a joint faculty position at Yale University in Psychology and African & African American Studies where she was also a research fellow at Yale's Center for Race, Inequality, and Politics. At Stanford, she has conducted programs of research in areas ranging from social neuroscience to the intersection of psychology and law. In her most recent work, she examines how social representations of race can affect visual perception and neural processing. In 2002, she received a Distinguished Alumnae Award for this research from the University of Cincinnati (where she completed her undergraduate education in 1987). She is a research fellow at the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE). Additionally, she joins Hazel Markus in directing the Mind, Culture, and Society specialization track for advanced undergraduates. She has served on the Committee of Visitors for the National Science Foundation. She is currently a member of the American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Society, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. During the 2005-2006 academic year, Jennifer served as a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences.

Jennifer's research focuses primarily upon racial stereotyping, prejudice, and stigma; specifically, she has studied the effects of social knowledge and representations on visual perception, attention, and memory. Currently, she and her colleagues are examining associations between race and crime. She is especially interested in how representations of Black Americans as criminal can guide visual processing. She continues to explore the effects of stereotypicality on a variety of phenomena, ranging from visual perception to criminal sentencing. Several of Jennifer's projects have also addressed the role of social identity cues in visual perception. Another area of interest to her is that of implicit racial ideologies, or lay theories of race, and how such beliefs affect perceptions of societal inequities. Finally, Jennifer has examined how knowledge of racial categories influence face processing. She is exploring this through neuroimaging studies that examine the role of the fusiform face area (FFA) in producing the cross-race effect.

Can the link between race and crime influence visual processing? Is this link bi-directional?

In American society, Blacks are strongly associated with criminality. Jennifer and her colleagues argue that the association of Black Americans with criminality leads to significant changes - not simply in how we feel, think, and behave, but - in how we see. For example, when exposed to crime-relevant objects, perceivers visually attend to Black faces more so than White faces. Alternatively, the mere presence of a Black face enhances perceivers' ability to detect degraded images of crime-relevant objects (see images on the left). Jennifer has conducted numerous studies using multiple methods that focus on the relationship between race, crime, and visual processing. She and her colleagues contend that visual processing is an important means through which the association of Blacks with criminality is evident and maintained.

Stereotypes are commonly defined as mental representations that link social groups to specific attributes, traits, and concepts. Nevertheless, stereotypes typically are measured by examining these links in one direction only. Extensive research documents the extent to which exposure to social group members or labels can bring to mind the attributes and concepts that have become associated with those groups. Inspired by the 1999 shooting death of an unarmed Black man (Amadou Diallo) by four White police officers in New York City, several recent studies have examined the effects of the race-crime link on misidentifications of guns and harmless objects. In contrast, little research explores the extent to which exposure to attributes and concepts can bring to mind social groups. Jennifer and her colleagues argue that, given the tight coupling of race and criminality, bringing to mind one helps people to envision the other. Simple exposure to Black faces should facilitate the perception of crime-relevant objects. Similarly, simple exposure to crime-relevant objects should direct visual attention towards Black faces. Empirical support of this contention therefore represents an important expansion of research on race and stereotyping, insofar as it suggests that ostensibly race-neutral concepts (such as crime) can become racialized.

Eberhardt, J. L., Goff, P. A., Purdie, V. J., & Davies, P.G. (2004). Seeing black: Race, crime, and visual processing. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87, 876-963.

Eberhardt, J. L., & Goff, P. A. (2005). Seeing race. In C. S. Crandall & M. Schaller (Eds.), Social psychology of prejudice: Historical and contemporary issues. (pp. 215-232). Lawrence, KS: Lewinian Press.

Can racial stereotypicality influence life-or-death decisions?

Jennifer has also studied racial stereotypicality in a variety of domains, such as application of the death penalty. The vast majority of studies designed to examine the influence of race in capital punishment have found that murderers of White victims are much more likely than murderers of Black victims to be sentenced to death. Drawing from an extensive database compiled by David Baldus, she and her colleagues obtained the photographs of Black defendants who were death eligible in Philadelphia from 1979 to 1999. She presented the faces of Black defendants who had killed White victims to naive participants (who did not know that the photographs depicted convicted murders) and asked them to rate each face on how stereotypically Black it appeared. The effect of stereotypicality was clear. Whereas only 24% of the defendants rated as less stereotypically Black received a death sentence, 58% of the defendants rated as more stereotypically Black received a death sentence. This stereotypicality effect was significant even when controlling for defendant attractiveness and the most significant non-racial factors known to influence sentencing (i.e., aggravating or mitigating circumstances, murder severity, defendant socioeconomic status, and victim socioeconomic status).

Eberhardt, J. L., Davies, P. G., Purdie-Vaughns, V. J., & Johnson, S. L. (2006). Looking deathworthy: Perceived stereotypicality of Black defendants predicts capital-sentencing outcomes. Psychological Science, 17, 383-386.

How do social cues and social beliefs influence face perception?

Much of person perception research is based upon principles borrowed directly from visual perception. While this research has highlighted how individual and situational variables (e.g., attitudes, values, beliefs, and expectancies) shape how people are regarded and how their actions are interpreted, the role of such variables in the perception of people's physical features has been largely overlooked. Instead of being examined as a psychological phenomenon possibly influenced by situational and individual variables, the perception of people's physical appearance is seen simply as the uncontroversial starting point for social psychological outcomes.

Jennifer contends, however, that social variables can inform visual perception as well. For example, the perception of people's physical characteristics can be influenced by racial category labels and social beliefs. She and her colleagues have shown that the simple act of assigning a racial label to a racially ambiguous face can powerfully influence one's perception of, and memory for, that face. The direction of the effect depends on people's pre-existing beliefs about human traits as immutable and having predictive validity (entitative) or as malleable and less predictive (incremental). Whereas entity theorists assimilate ambiguous target facesto the racial label provided, incremental theorists contrast the target faces away from the labels. For example, when asked to draw the target faces, entity theorists are more likely than incremental theorists to draw faces later rated by judges as consistent with the racial label provided (see images above). Entity theorists are also more likely to mistake for the target face a foil more stereotypically consistent with that label. Thus, both entity and incremental theorists exhibit systematic errors in their identification and drawing of the ambiguous faces; social identity cues (labels) systematically distort - in opposite directions - their visual perception of these faces.

Eberhardt, J. L., Dasgupta, N., & Banaszynski, T. L. (2003). Believing is seeing: The effects of racial labels and implicit beliefs on face perception. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 29, 360-370.

Eberhardt, J.L., Doty, N., & Goff, P. A. (in press). Keeping track of identity: Social identity cues direct eye movements on faces. Perception.

Does understanding race as biological or as socially constructed influence perceptions of racial inequalities?

Jennifer and her colleagues have developed a tool allowing researchers to easily identify lay theorists with biological or social conceptions of race. Those with a biological conception of race (BC individuals) understand racial categories to be based in biology, heritable, permanent, and stable within an individual, over time, and across cultures. Those with a social conception of race (SC individuals) understand racial categories as generally socially constructed, subject to political or cultural changes, and to be generally fluid. This research also tested the implications and consequences of conceiving of race as primarily biological versus primarily social in nature.

The instrument that Jennifer and colleagues produced reliably distinguishes BC and SC individuals, tapping into a construct and a set of attitudinal and behavioral correlates that are all separable from - albeit related to - traditional measures of explicit racial prejudice. Both BC and SC participants evinced comparable awareness of racial stereotypes, but the former were more likely to endorse them. Relative to SC individuals, furthermore, BC participants had a less diverse circle of close others, reported more pessimism about overcoming race-related inequities, and more frequently attributed such inequalities to "inherent trait differences" between Black and White Americans.

Williams, M. J. & Eberhardt, J. L. (2005). Physical versus social conceptions of race and the motivation to cross racial boundaries. Manuscript under review.

Eberhardt, J. L. & Randall, J. L. (1997). The essential notion of race. Psychological Science, 8, 198-203.

Does our knowledge of race influence how the brain processes faces?

Jennifer and her colleagues have used fMRI to study the neural basis of the recognition advantage for same-race faces. The behavioral results accord with many other studies showing superior recognition memory for same-race compared to other-race faces, an effect stronger for European American than African American participants. Compared to other-race faces, same-race faces were associated with greater activation in fusiform regions previously identified as areas of initial specialization for the perception of faces and modulated by expertise. Regardless of the method used to identify the FFA, this region was more active for same-race than for other-race faces in at least 84% of participants. Additionally, activation within the left fusiform was positively correlated with the magnitude of the same-race recognition advantage for individual participants.

Golby, A. J., Gabrieli, J. D. E., Chiao, J. Y., & Eberhardt, J. L. (2001). Differential responses in the fusiform region to same-race and other-race faces. Nature Neuroscience, 4, 845 - 850.

Eberhardt, J. L. (2005). Imaging race. American Psychologist, 60, 181-190.

Selected other publications:

Eberhardt, J. L. & Fiske, S. T. (Eds.) (1998). Confronting Racism: The problem and the response. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Banks, R. R., & Eberhardt, J. L. (1998). Social psychological processes and the legal bases of racial categorization. In J. L. Eberhardt & S. T. Fiske (Eds.), Confronting racism: The problem and the response. (pp. 54-75). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Eberhardt, J. L. & Fiske, S. T. (1996). Motivating individuals to change: What's a target to do? In N. Macrae, C. Stangor, & M. Hewstone (Eds.), Stereotypes and Stereotyping. New York: Guilford.

Eberhardt, J. L., & Fiske, S. T. (1994). Affirmative action in theory and practice: Issues of power, ambiguity, and gender versus race. Basic and Applied Social Psychology Special Issue: Social psychological perspectives on affirmative action, 15, 201-220.

Jennifer and Hazel Markus co-direct the Mind, Culture, and Society Research Lab in the Stanford Psychology Department. The lab explores the ways in which culture and its products shape individuals, and the ways in which individuals in turn shape their culture. The MCS lab has several ongoing projects united by the common theme of exploring the ways in which psychological functioning (i.e., how we think, feel, and act) is malleable and conditioned by our sociocultural contexts (social class, race, ethnicity, nationality, etc.) and by social representations of various groups. The MCS lab has several lines of research focusing on how race, stigma, and stereotyping affect attitudes, perception, and behavior. Through research, the lab aims to help facilitate intergroup communication, contact, and understanding and to develop, research, and disseminate the idea that there are multiple ways to be. For more information about the Mind, Culture, and Society Lab, please visit its website at: http://psychology.stanford.edu/~mcslab.

Jennifer is currently directing an ambitious initiative -- the Policing Racial Bias project -- with generous support from the National Science Foundation and the Russell Sage Foundation, as well as three Stanford University co-sponsors: the Research Institute for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, the Center for Social Innovation, and the Office of the President.

The primary goal of the Policing Racial Bias project is to develop partnerships among social psychologists and law enforcement agencies to share information and generate new knowledge on the influence of racial bias in policing.

She and her partners on this project, Los Angeles County Sheriff Leroy Baca, San Francisco Police Chief Heather Fong, San Mateo County Sheriff Don Horsley, joined forces to convene the initial conference in September of 2004. Over 160 people attended, including law enforcement officials from 34 agencies, and now a variety of multi-jurisdictional research collaborations are underway between social psychologists and law enforcement agencies nationwide. For more information about the project, please visit: http://policingproject.stanford.edu.

Last Updated: 11/21/2005