Do Racial Stereotypes Affect the Way We Communicate?

by Monica Joshi

Never judge a book by its cover. Easy words, hard advice to follow especially when we live in a multi-racial community. Even more difficult when stereotypes regarding certain groups or races are prevalent in the multicultural community and reinforced via the music, movies and literature that we consume. New research from the University of British Columbia (UBC) has shown that these stereotypes affect our expectations of what a person sounds like when they speak.

The new study, published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America demonstrates how non-verbal cues"social cues", such as pictures of Chinese Canadians, can affect the way that we understand speech.

Molly Babel, the paper's lead author and assistant professor at UBC's Department of Linguistics, said:

“This research brings to light our internal biases, and the role of experience and stereotypes, in how we listen to and hear each other.”

The goal of the study was to assess speech perception in noise, accentedness rating, an implicit measure of ethnic bias and an explicit measure of ethnic bias. The study used recordings by 12 native speakers of Canadian English. Half of the speakers were self-identified as white, while the others self-identified as Chinese. All of the speakers, however, were born and raised in Richmond, B.C., a city just south of Vancouver. The study asked participants to transcribe prerecorded sentences amid background static. These pre-recordings were accompanied by black and white pictures of the speakers or images of three crosses.

The most interesting conclusion of the study was that only when the listeners were made aware that the speaker was Chinese Canadian did they find understanding the recording harder. Participants were then asked to rate the strength of the accent of the speakers. They were then asked to listen to two sentences from each speaker, one accompanied by the speaker's photograph and the other with an image of three crosses. Even more surprisingly, when listeners were made aware that the speaker was a White Canadian, suddenly the speaker was perceived as having less of a foreign accent and sounding more like a native Canadian speaker.

Jamie Russell, the study’s co-author who was an undergraduate honours student in UBC’s Department of Linguistics during the project, noted that:

“It tells us as listeners that we need to be sensitive about the stereotypes that we carry.”

The importance of the study cannot be highlighted enough as the number of racial stereotypes that we carry are abundant. From movies to TV shows that exploit the various different biases that we hold to the music and the literature that confirm them. Assuming that a person of a certain skin colour of even of a certain background (i.e. the country that they or their ancestors are from) is going to sound different or act differently is an unnecessary explicit bias that simply doesn't have a place in our multicultural society.

The study pushes us one step further to recognize our biases and change our perceptions about what we would expect to hear when we see a person of a certain racial background. Besides, you know what they say about assuming things... hint: it's not a good idea.