News Release
April 25, 2006
For Immediate Release
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Contact: Jennifer L. Eberhardt
(650) 321-2052 ex. 253
jle@psych.stanford.edu
Can Looking Black Get You Killed?
Convicts with Stereotypically Black Faces are More Likely to get the Death Penalty, Stanford Study Shows
Examples of variation in stereotypicality of Black faces. These images are the faces of people with no criminal history and are shown here for illustrative purposes only. The face on the right would be considered more stereotypically Black than the face on the left.
The researchers first asked student participants to view photographs of Black men, all of whom were death-eligible defendants convicted in the Philadelphia, PA area over the past several decades. The participants did not know that the photographs were of convicted criminals. Participants then rated the photographs on how stereotypically Black each appeared.
Results showed that the more stereotypically Black students judged a convict to look, the more likely he was to have received the death penalty: 58 percent of convicts rated as more stereotypically Black were sentenced to death, as compared to only 24 percent of those rated as less stereotypically Black.
The study design controlled for attractiveness and other nonracial factors known to influence sentencing, including aggravating and mitigating circumstances, severity of the murder, defendant socioeconomic status, and victim socioeconomic status.
Even more surprisingly, the effect of Black stereotypical appearance emerged only in cases involving White victims. When Black defendants were convicted of killing Black victims, there was no relationship between defendants’ physical appearances and the sentences they received. These results resonate with previous findings on race and the death penalty, which consistently show that defendants accused of killing White victims are much more likely to be sentenced to death than those accused of killing Blacks.
A growing body of research shows that people apply racial stereotypes more readily to Black Americans who are perceived as more stereotypically Black--that is, people seen as having broad noses, thick lips, or dark skin. In previous research, for example, Eberhardt and colleagues presented police officers with the faces of Black and White males and asked the question: Who looks criminal? Not only did police officers judge more Black faces as criminal than White faces, they judged the Black faces that looked most stereotypically Black as the most criminal of all.
"Race clearly matters in criminal justice in ways in which people may or may not be consciously aware," Eberhardt explained.
"When Black defendants are accused of killing Whites, perhaps jurors use the degree to which these defendants appear stereotypically Black as a proxy for criminality, and then punish accordingly."
Looking Deathworthy: Perceived Stereotypicality of Black Defendants Predicts Capital-Sentencing Outcomes by Eberhardt, Davies, Purdie-Vaughns, and Johnson will appear in the May 2006 issue of Psychological Science.
Co-Authors:
Paul G. Davies, Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles, Tel: (310) 825-8587
Email: davies@psych.ucla.edu
Valerie J. Purdie-Vaughns, Ph.D., Yale University, Tel: 203-436-1312
E-mail: Valerie.Purdie@yale.edu
Sheri Lynn Johnson, J.D., Cornell Law School, Tel: 607-255-6478
E-mail: sheri-johnson@postoffice.law.cornell.edu