Government instability prompts both Black and White Americans to show a preference for lighter-skinned over darker-skinned political candidates, researchers at New York University, the University of Chicago, and Rutgers University have found. In addition, their findings, which appear in the latest issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, show that Whites express a greater interest in voting for a lighter-skinned candidate than a darker skinned candidate for an important political position, regardless of whether they think the government is stable or unstable. Alternatively, Blacks express greater interest in voting for a darker-skinned candidate when they see the government as stable.

"Our results show that when the system is seen as running smoothly, people engage in behaviors to enhance the social standing of their group, which explains preferences for a darker-skinned candidate among the study's Black participants," says Chadly Stern, a doctoral candidate in NYU's Department of Psychology and the study's lead author. "However, when the system is shaky, both Blacks and Whites show strong preferences for preserving the status quo, and so express greater interest in a lighter-skinned candidate."

In a series of experiments, subjects were shown photographs of a hypothetical candidate for public office--the images used were of a man whom the study's participants would be unlikely to recognize: 32-year-old Canadian hockey player Jarome Iginla, wearing a suit and tie, whose father is a Black Nigerian and whose mother is a White American. The researchers created three different versions of the photographs: one was unaltered, one was changed to lighten Iginla's skin tone, and one was changed to darken it.

In the experiments, participants were asked to indicate how representative each photo (lighter-skinned, unaltered, darker-skinned) was of the candidate on a 1 (not at all) to 7 (a great deal) scale. This measure captured the mental image that people held, reflecting what they thought the candidate looked like. They were also asked to indicate the likelihood that they would vote for the candidate in an election on a 1 (not at all likely) to 7 (very likely) scale.