|
FirmhandKY -> Liberals prefer a lighter skinned Obama (2/26/2010 1:01:50 PM)
|
News
Liberals prefer a lighter skinned Obama, study says
By Bonnie Davis
4:30 PM on 11/23/2009
When given a choice between a photo of a lighter-skinned version of Barack Obama versus a darker-skinned version, most voters who consider themselves Democrats last year selected the lighter version.
That's what research set to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences found after surveying voters before and after the 2008 presidential election.
The survey of nearly 400 voters in Chicago and at Arizona and Florida State universities sought to determine how different people "see the world" and what effect, if any, skin color plays in one's personal or group politics, says Emily Balcetis, one of the researchers. A focal point was Obama's position as "racially ambiguous" or biracial.
"We showed participants several different photos of Barack Obama, and asked them to rate how well each photo represented who he really is," Balcetis says, explaining the research methodology. "Unbeknownst to participants, we altered some of the photos to make the candidate's skin tone lighter, and some to make the candidate's skin tone darker, than it was in the original photograph."
One of the researchers, Eugene Caruso of the University of Chicago, discovered that participants whose partisanship was the same as that of the candidate "consistently rated the lightened photographs as more representative of the candidate than the darkened photographs, whereas participants whose partisanship did not match that of the candidate showed the opposite pattern."
What kind of conclusions can we draw from this?
Firm
|
|
|
|
