Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

After viewing Black males faces, US participants are typically faster to categorize weapons and slower to categorize tools than afterviewing White male faces, revealing the activation of implicit stereotypes linking Black males with violent crime. Here we testedwhether hearing Black male voices speaking in African American Vernacular English (AAVE) activates these same threat-relatedstereotypes. In a national US sample, participants were faster to categorize weapons compared to tools after hearing race-neutralnames spoken in AAVE than after hearing them spoken in Standard American English (SAE). Like Black faces, Black voices canactivate violent stereotypes, affecting visual discrimination of objects.