Although social science has well established the influence of racial stereotypes across seemingly every area of life, researchers are still finding new ways that they impact us. Northwestern University recently announced new research demonstrating that racial stereotypes impact whether a risk-taker is perceived as reckless or responsible.
“People consistently showed this tendency to perceive Black people as more risk-taking and more reckless,” said Dr. Sylvia Perry, an associate professor of psychology at Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and the project’s senior researcher. “We were surprised about how large the effects were.”
Perry and Dr. James Wages, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Central Arkansas and the paper’s lead author, began by showing study participants headshots of 30 Black and 30 white men. The participants were asked to rate how much of a risk-taker they thought that each person was. As Perry and Wages predicted, subjects rated the Black men as significantly more likely to take risks. 
Dr. Sylvia Perry
With a link between risk and race established, the researchers then examined the connection between race and different kinds of risk-taking. They had participants suggest personality traits of either responsible risk-takers (“intelligent,” “ambitious”) or reckless risk-takers, (“impulsive,” “aggressive”) and then analyzed how stereotypically white or Black the traits had been found to be in prior research. Participants suggested stereotypically whiter traits for the responsible risk-takers and stereotypically Blacker traits for the reckless ones.
But subjects didn’t only believe that reckless and responsible risk-takers had stereotypically Black and white traits. They also visualized reckless and responsible risk-takers in racialized ways. Perry and Wages created aggregate images of the faces of responsible and reckless risk-takers by asking participants to compare images of racially ambiguous faces and choose which one seemed more responsible or reckless. When the researchers showed these aggregate images to other subjects, they found that the participants were more likely to assign stereotypically Black traits to the reckless risk-taker image, as well as to rate that image as more Afrocentric in appearance.
The researchers also showed that these associations could have social consequences. In one experiment, subjects were given 25 cents and told that they could divide the money however they wanted between two investors. They were told that the potential outcomes ranged between tripling their money and losing it all. No other information was given about the investors, but the subjects were given images of them: the aggregate reckless risk-taker and responsible risk-taker from the previous study. Participants allocated 69% more money to the investor represented by the responsible risk-taker image, which had been rated as less Afrocentric looking.
Additionally, Perry and Wages showed that the image of reckless risk-taking was specifically being evoked by stereotypes of Blackness and not simply arising because both reckless risk-taking and Blackness are stereotypically associated with certain negative traits. The researchers mocked up Twitter profiles suggestive of reckless risk-takers (“I choose to live RECKLESSLY and take chances to get what I want, whatever the consequences”) and responsible risk-takers (“LIFE IS RISK. I manage it RESPONSIBLY”). The races of the mock users were unclear.
