Judgment of crowds as emotional increases with the proportion of black faces

Decades of research have sought to characterize how racialization affects the evaluation of faces. However, research has mostly focused on the perception of single faces. In the current project we address this gap by examining whether racialization affects crowd perception, even in the absence of perceived differences at the single-face level. In Experiments 1–2, participants viewed crowds of faces expressing different degrees of happiness or anger and different ratios of lighter-skinned faces (racialized as White) and darker-skinned faces (racialized as black). A higher proportion of Black faces led to a greater likelihood of perceiving the crowd as emotional. Experiment 3 confirmed this effect was not solely driven by the contrast between White and Black faces within a crowd, as crowds composed of entirely Black faces were more likely to be evaluated as emotional than crowds of White and Black faces. Using hierarchical drift diffusion models, we compared potential mechanisms and found that Black faces expressing emotions weighed more heavily than White faces in judging whether a crowd was emotional. These results shed light on an important way in which racialization impacts judgments of collective emotion.