Final Evaluation of Halal and the Family: Measuring Effects on Implicit and Explicit Anti-Muslim Bias

Developed by comedian Aasif Mandvi (a former Daily Show correspondent), Moore + Associates, Sweet 180 Productions, and a coalition of advocacy organizations, Halal in the Family is a web series that presents a sitcom parody featuring a Muslim American family. Designed to combat bias and prejudice against Muslims and to expose a broad audience to the realities of being Muslim in America, the series includes four 4-minute episodes ("The Amazing Race," "B'ully," "Spies Like Us," and "A Very Spooq'y Halloween Special"), each focusing on a different challenge faced by Muslim Americans and their communities. To determine whether watching the episodes would actually affect the way viewers think and feel about Muslim Americans, Moore + Associates engaged a team of scientists through Perception Institute, coordinated by Professor Rachel Godsil, to conduct an evaluation of the efficacy of the the series in reducing anti-Muslim bias, increasing viewers' support for laws to prevent discrimination against Muslims, and impacting the way viewers perceive Muslims.

The Influence of Social Comparison on Visual Representation of One's Face

Can the effects of social comparison extend beyond explicit evaluation to visual self-representation—a perceptual stimulus that is objectively verifiable, unambiguous, and frequently updated? We morphed images of participants' faces with attractive and unattractive references. With access to a mirror, participants selected the morphed image they perceived as depicting their face. Participants who engaged in upward comparison with relevant attractive targets selected a less attractive morph compared to participants exposed to control images (Study 1). After downward comparison with relevant unattractive targets compared to control images, participants selected a more attractive morph (Study 2). Biased representations were not the products of cognitive accessibility of beauty constructs; comparisons did not influence representations of strangers' faces (Study 3). We discuss implications for vision, social comparison, and body image

Motivated Visual Perception: How We See What We Want To See

In 2001, a U.S. nuclear submarine surfaced underneath a Japanese fishing vessel, causing it to sink-9 died. In 1999, 41 bullets fired by 4 New York police officers hit and killed Amidou Diallo, who pulled from his pocket a wallet rather than what the police thought was a gun. In both tragedies, one might ask how these central actors could have failed to see what was plainly visible. With this work, I ask how perceptual systems represent the surrounding world if not in a veridical manner. I propose that the perceptual representations of which perceivers are consciously aware are colored by nonconscious motivational forces. Motivations, including wishes, dissonance reduction, and visceral needs, bias visual perception. Three streams of research examined the ways in which motivations constrain perceptual processing. The first stream demonstrated that people's wishes biased the resolution of visual ambiguity. In 5 studies, participants shown an ambiguous visual figure reported seeing the desired interpretation. This finding was affirmed by unobtrusive and implicit measures of perception including eyetracking, lexical decision response times, and experimental manipulations. In the second stream, I explored whether the motivation to reduce cognitive dissonance biased perception and assisted in the regulation of psychological states. In 2 studies, participants performed an aversive task under high or low choice conditions. Participants saw components of their environment in less extreme ways in order to reduce dissonance. Those experiencing high choice perceived distances to travel as shorter and slopes to climb as shallower. In the third stream, 5 studies showed that desires such as hunger, thirst, and general preferences led to a narrowed focus of attention on a desired object. Narrowly focusing attention reduced estimates of distance. Participants saw desired objects as closer than less desired objects. I end by discussing the implications for marketing, self-screening in early cancer detection and relationship satisfaction among other applied domains. This work explores the limits of motivations, testing whether they cross the boundary separating how people think about their world and how they see it.The research in Chapters 2, 3, and 4 was supported financially by National Institute of Mental Health Grant RO1 56072, awarded to David Dunning

See What You Want to See: Motivational Influences on Visual Perception,”

People's motivational states-their wishes and preferences-influence their processing of visual stimuli. In 5 studies, participants shown an ambiguous figure (e.g., one that could be seen either as the letter B or the number 13) tended to report seeing the interpretation that assigned them to outcomes they favored. This finding was affirmed by unobtrusive and implicit measures of perception (e.g., eye tracking, lexical decision tasks) and by experimental procedures demonstrating that participants were aware only of the single (usually favored) interpretation they saw at the time they viewed the stimulus. These studies suggest that the impact of motivation on information processing extends down into preconscious processing of stimuli in the visual environment and thus guides what the visual system presents to conscious awareness. Keywords: motivation, visual perception, motivated reasoning, New Look, ambiguous figures The world that people know is the one they take in through their senses. This is the world they react to-the one their conscious thoughts, feelings, and actions are predicated on. People act on the presumption that the world they are consciously aware of is a comprehensive and accurate representation of the environment that exactly copies the outside world as it truly is. Decades of research in psychology, however, tend to undermine the assumption that what people see or hear is an exact replica of what is out in the world, in two different ways. First, perception is selective. People are not aware of everything that is going on around them. Consider, for example, recent studies of attentional blindness. Of undergraduates asked to monitor how many times people in a videotape pass a basketball among themselves, 40% failed to see the woman in a gorilla suit saunter into the middle of the group, turn to the camera, beat her chest, and then walk out Moreover, perception is malleable. It is responsive to top-down influences that flow from the perceiver's cognitive and psychological states or from environments But a substantial volume of psychological research reveals that top-down influences also inform perception. For example, context matters. Prior exposure to images of animals or people biases what people see when they view classic ambiguous figures, such as the rat-man and old woman-young woman figures so often featured in introductory psychology textbooks In the current article, we explore one possible top-down influence on perception that has been shown to have a profound and ubiquitous impact in other arenas of social cognition. That influence is the perceiver's motivational states-more specifically, the motivation to think of one's self and one's prospects in a favorable way, to believe that one will achieve positive outcomes while 2006, Vol. 91, No. 4, 612-625 0022-3514/06/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037 612 being able to avoid aversive ones, and to enhance self-worth and esteem. This motivation in the psychological literature has several names, such as motivated reasoning, self-affirmation, wishful thinking, and defensive processing, and has been shown to have a widespread influence in shaping how people think about their world, that is, how they interpret information of which they are consciously aware. This motive has been shown to influence such higher order tasks as judging other people, evaluating the self, predicting the future, and making sense of the past (for reviews, see In the studies that follow, we examine the scope of motivated reasoning to see if it crosses the boundary between how people think about their outside world and how they perceive it. Certainly, motivated reasoning influences conscious, deliberate, and effortful judgments, but we ask if it can constrain what information reaches consciousness in the first place. Does the impact of motivated reasoning or wishful thinking, more specifically, extend down to preconscious processing of visual information? We test, in essence, whether people literally are prone to see what they want to see. The Impact of Motivational States There exist some indirect hints that the motives underlying wishful thinking have an impact on visual perception. Recent work focusing on more biologically oriented motivational states shows that they influence the perception of visual stimuli. For example, But would a drive toward wishful thinking similarly influence perception? In a sense, this question is a revisiting and a reopening of one of the focal issues of the New Look approach to perception that arose in psychology during the 1940s and 1950s These initial demonstrations of motivational influences on perception were met with much enthusiasm, which was then followed by withering criticism. To be sure, much of what the New Look theorists proposed has lasted through today and informs contemporary cognitive and perceptual psychology in fundamental ways. Psychologists uniformly agree with the New Look tenet that much of cognition happens nonconsciously, that is, outside a person's awareness, monitoring, or control However, the specific New Look assertion that motivational states influence perception did not achieve the same stature and longevity as these other insights. It, instead, ran aground in the 1950s on the rocky shoals of methodological difficulties and theoretical controversies As such, the influence of motivational states on perception was never firmly established. And as the 1950s closed the study of the relation between motivational states and perception, this pursuit fell by the wayside and ceased to have the major impact-if any at all-enjoyed by other insights from the New Look tradition Perception of Ambiguous Figures In the present research, we examined the impact of motivational states on perception by focusing on interpretations of ambiguous or reversible figures-visual stimuli, like the famous Necker cube, that people can interpret in two different ways but for which they tend to see only one interpretation at any given time In each of five studies, we told participants that they were about to be assigned to one of two experimental tasks, one being much more desirable than the other. We also told participants that a computer sitting in front of them was about to present them a stimulus that would indicate which task they were assigned to. In fact, in each study, the computer presented a figure that could be interpreted in two different ways: one way that would assign participants to their favored task and one that would assign them to the opposite. We expected that participants would tend to see the interpretation that assigned them to the outcome they favored. MOTIVATIONAL INFLUENCES ON VISUAL PERCEPTION Because our experimental stimuli, like much of the contents of our surroundings, lack clarity and contain multiple interpretations, potential interpretations of a visual stimulus can be likened to a hypothesis Just as expectancies and contexts can suggest a testable perceptual hypothesis, a preference or desire might privilege a favored interpretation or hypothesis over a disfavored one. Wishful thinking might shape the specific hypothesis that individuals test when given such ambiguous information. In particular, the perceiver might scan the visual stimulus in a biased manner, searching for features that match those of the desired animal rather than those that match an undesired one. The net effect of focusing on a hypothesis is that the perceiver tends to seek out information that would confirm it rather than disconfirm it Alternatively, a motivated preference might lower the threshold required for the visual system to decide it matches the favored interpretation. Other work in motivated reasoning has shown that information consistent with a favored conclusion is held to a lower standard of scrutiny than information consistent with an unwanted one The key to whatever process is at play is that it takes place preconsciously. People are not aware that they have selected one interpretation over another. Indeed, they are not even aware of the alternative interpretation. Whatever work the visual system has done to bias the interpretation that people see involves processes below the level of awareness. Overview of Studies Studies 1 and 2 demonstrated that participants tended to report seeing the interpretation of an ambiguous figure that fit with their wishes and preferences over one that did not. Studies 3 and 4 added implicit measures to ensure that participants truly saw the interpretation they reported rather than simply reporting the preferred interpretation. Study 5 added a procedural twist to affirm that participants saw only the interpretation they usually wanted to see as they viewed the stimulus and that it was not the case that they saw both interpretations and then only reported the favored one. In short, people tended to honestly see only that interpretation that was suggested, in part, by their motivational state. Study 1: Disambiguating an Ambiguous Method Participants. Participants were 88 undergraduates at Cornell University who earned extra credit in their psychology or human development courses for taking part in the study. Procedure. In what was advertised as a taste-testing experiment, an experimenter explained that participants would predict taste sensations for two beverages, consume only one beverage, and describe their actual taste sensation of that one beverage. On the table in front of participants sat the two beverages. The first was the desirable one: freshly squeezed orange juice. The second was the less desirable alternative: a gelatinous, chunky, green, foul-smelling, somewhat viscous concoction labeled as an "organic veggie smoothie." 1 The experimenter invited participants first to smell each beverage. Then, participants spent 3 min predicting what they might experience if asked to drink 8 ounces (about 240 ml) of each beverage to heighten the appeal of the orange juice and strengthen their disgust with the veggie smoothie. Participants were seated in front of a 15-in. G3 iBook. The experimenter then explained that a computer program would randomly select a beverage for the participant to consume. Specifically, the computer would select either a single letter or a single number from a set of 26 letters and 26 numbers. Roughly half of the participants, those in the number-desirable condition, were told that if the computer selected a number from the set, they would drink 8 ounces (about 240 ml) of orange juice, and if a letter was selected, they would drink 8 ounces (about 240 ml) of veggie smoothie. The remaining participants in the letter-desirable condition learned that a letter would result in their assignment to the orange juice and a number to the veggie smoothie. After inviting the participant to review these directions on a computer screen, the experimenter stepped away to ostensibly complete some paperwork. Participants focused on the center of the monitor on which was displayed a static fixation point. After 3 s, this fixation point was replaced with an ambiguous figure (1 in. in height, 1 in. in width) that could be interpreted as either the capital letter B or the number 13 (see After receiving an answer, the experimenter handed the participant a questionnaire to complete while she supposedly left to prepare the bever-1 Recipe available on request. BALCETIS AND DUNNING age. This questionnaire probed for suspicion of the purpose of the study, suspicion of the computer crash, and in a funneled manner queried participants to see if they realized the ambiguity in the figure shown before the computer crash. Results A priori, we established conditions for the inclusion of participants' data. Participants were excluded if they recognized the figure was ambiguous, were able to explain the purpose of the study in debriefing, or mentioned they wished to be assigned to what was considered by most participants to be the less desired task (i.e., consumption of veggie smoothie). Given these criteria, 15 people were excluded for recognizing the ambiguity in the figure when viewing the figure, 4 for explaining that we were interested in how their desires could influence the way they saw the figure, 3 for stating they hoped to consume the smoothie, and 3 simply refused to participate when they heard that they might be asked to consume the smoothie. This left data from 63 participants for analysis. Although a few participants indicated the computer crash was suspicious, none of these participants were able to describe the purpose of the study or the reason for the crash. Responses from those 63 participants were coded by means of the following method. Reports of the letter B were given a score of ϩ1, and reports of the number 13 a score of Ϫ1. Those who did not offer a response or indicated that nothing was shown before the crash received a score of 0. We then subjected these scores to an ordinal logistical regression analysis (the constrained range of the coding system made more usual statistical procedures less appropriate) to see if participants tended to see different interpretations of the ambiguous figure depending on which interpretation was more desirable. As expected, participants' desire to see either letters or numbers influenced their interpretation of the B-13 ambiguous figure, 2 (1, N ϭ 63) ϭ 23.92, p Ͻ .001. In particular, when hoping to see a letter, 72% (n ϭ 18) of participants reported seeing the capital letter B, whereas 0% reported seeing a 13. When hoping to see a number, 60.5% (n ϭ 23) reported seeing a 13 and 23.7% (n ϭ 9) reported seeing the B. Some people in each condition reported that in fact nothing was shown before the crash (28%, n ϭ 7, in the letter-favorable condition; 15.8%, n ϭ 6, in the number-favorable condition). Our specific prediction focuses on the responses of those who offered an interpretation of the figure. When excluding those responses from participants who reported that nothing was shown before the crash, participants' desire to see either letters or numbers influenced their interpretation of the B-13 ambiguous figure, 2 (1, N ϭ 50) ϭ 23.96, p Ͻ .001. Additionally, we can collapse across the specific character participants were motivated to see and look at just the reported interpretation for those participants who offered one. In fact, 82% (n ϭ 41) of participants reported the desired interpretation, 2 (1, N ϭ 50) ϭ 20.48, p Ͻ .001. In addition, including those people in the analyses who indicated that the figure was ambiguous does not change this pattern, as similar numbers of participants across both motivational conditions reported the ambiguity of the figure (n ϭ 8, when hoping to see letters; n ϭ 7, when hoping to see numbers). That is, we gave a score of 0 to those people who indicated the figure was ambiguous and again conducted an ordinal logistic regression. Still, participants' desire to see either a letter or a number influenced their interpretation of the ambiguous Discussion In sum, Study 1 provided evidence that people's motivational states can influence their interpretation of ambiguous objects in their environment. When faced with an ambiguous figure that could be interpreted as either a number or letter, the interpretation that reached consciousness and was reported tended to be the one that placed participants in a desirable circumstance rather than in an unwanted one. However, it is possible that the participants' responses did not reflect their true percept. Instead of reporting what they saw, they instead just offered a report that assigned them to the orange juice. Put simply, participants may have lied about what they saw. Although we suspect this is not the case, we conducted a follow-up to assess this counterexplanation. In a design similar to Study 1, 28 participants were either motivated to see letters or numbers to avoid the veggie smoothie but were then shown unambiguous figures of B or 13, rather than an ambiguous figure, during the computer assignment process. For half of the participants, a letter assigned them to the orange juice, whereas for the other half a number assigned them to the veggie smoothie. Crossed with this, half of the participants were shown a B and the other half were shown a 13, resulting in a 2 (desired character: letter or number) ϫ 2 (character shown: B or 13) factorial. The alternative account predicts that participants' reports of the figure shown to them would be influenced by which character was desired as well as what character was shown to them. However, inconsistent with that account, we found that what participants reported depended only on the character shown to them. In all conditions, 100% of participants (n ϭ 7 in every cell) reported the actual figure shown, regardless of what figure was shown to them and what participants were motivated to see. Study 2: Replication Study 2 was designed as a conceptual replication involving a different ambiguous figure and a different procedure. In addition, in Study 1, we noted that a small but notable minority of partici- MOTIVATIONAL INFLUENCES ON VISUAL PERCEPTION pants was able to spot the ambiguity of the figure we showed them. In Study 2, we used a figure whose ambiguity was more opaque and thus not as likely to be noticed by participants. Method Participants. Participants were 52 undergraduates at Cornell University who received extra credit in their psychology course for taking part. Procedure. Participants completed a task ostensibly about differences in predictions of and actual taste experiences. The experimenter explained that participants would be experiencing and describing different taste sensations. Participants would predict taste sensations for three food items but actually consume only one of them. First, participants predicted what each of the following items would taste like: a bottle of Aquafina water, a bag of Jelly Belly candies, and a bag of gelatinous and partially liquified canned beans. After participants predicted taste sensations of each item, participants were seated in front of a 17-in. iMac 64 desktop computer. Again, supposedly to eliminate bias from the selection process, a computer program would randomly assign the item participants would consume. The experimenter explained that participants would play a game, and their final score would determine what item was consumed. In this game, the computer displayed pictures of animals worth positive and negative points. On the top of their response sheet was a table listing every animal that could be selected and the specific number of points each animal was worth. For half of the participants, farm animals were worth positive points, whereas sea creatures were worth negative points. For the other half of participants, this was reversed. Black and white drawings of the full bodies, heads, and artistic renditions of animals were displayed in the rounds that preceded the final round. Although the computer would be keeping an ongoing tally of the points accumulated, participants recorded the animal shown to them, the points that animal was worth, and their ongoing score ostensibly to corroborate the computer program. If their score at the end of 15 cards was zero, participants would consume the water. If their score was positive, they would consume the candies, but if their score at the end was negative, participants would consume the canned beans. Although participants were told that the program randomly selected animals from a set of four farm animals and four sea animals, the program was actually rigged such that every participant experienced one of two sequences of animals and point tallies, depending on what category of animal was worth positive point values. As the game progressed, ongoing scores, predetermined and consistent across participants, fluctuated between positive and negative. However, the last three rounds brought increasingly negative point totals. That is, ongoing scores became ever more suggestive that participants would consume the canned beans. Ongoing scores at the end of the penultimate round were such that only one animal was worth enough positive points to be able to pull participants from the negative and bring a positive final score, thus avoiding the canned beans. For half of the participants, this animal was a horse; for the other half, it was a seal. The animal displayed during the final trial was in fact an ambiguous figure (2.75 in. wide, 3.75 in. tall) that could be interpreted as either the head of a horse or the full body of a seal (see After the game, participants completed a funneled debriefing that probed for suspicion of the purpose of the study, possible alternate interpretations of the figure, and asked if they had seen the figure before. Results Given the criteria we established a priori, 5 participants were excluded for articulating the purpose of the study and 4 for mathematical errors that precluded them from desiring the target animal. No one reported seeing both interpretations of the ambiguous figure. These omissions left data from 43 participants for analysis. We used the same type of coding scheme for interpretations as in the previous studies. Given the natural bias of this ambiguous figure was to see a horse, those who reported a horse received a score of ϩ1. Because the less common interpretation of the figure was as a seal, those who reported a seal received a score of Ϫ1. Using an ordinal logistic regression, we found that participants' interpretations depended on what category of animal was worth positive points, 2 (1, N ϭ 43) ϭ 6.89, p ϭ .009. When hoping to see a horse, 66.7% (n ϭ 14) of participants saw the figure as a horse, and 33.3% (n ϭ 7) saw a

Means (SDs) for Explicit Self and Other Ratings of Attractiveness and Percent Morphed Face Selected During Visual Target Representation for Study 3.

<p><i>Note</i>: Subscripts that differ within rows indicate significance at <i>p</i><.05.</p