THE EFFECT OF SKIN COLOR ON THE PERCEPTION OF OCCUPATIONAL LEVEL IN THE UNITED STATES

A review of the literature of employment practices and what has popularly been called "race" revealed that persons with darker shades of skin color occupied lower socioeconomic levels than persons with lighter shades of skin color. Of the many factors contributing to this finding, the effect that a person's shade of skin color had on the perception of that person's occupational level by others had not been systematically investigated. This study investigated the hypothesis that persons with darker shades of skin color would be assigned lower occupational levels than persons with lighter shades of skin color. Male and female, white (n = 133) and non-white (n = 45) subjects from graduate and undergraduate courses in management and business were tachistoscopically presented with 15 different faces of 5 varying shades of skin color, each shade counterbalanced and controlled for "race", age, and sex. Subjects were asked to assign one of two of Hollingshead's (Note 1) scaled occupational titles to the faces. A monotonic trend index developed to analyze the data did not confirm the hypothesis. Repeated measures analysis of variance and a Newman-Keuls test, however, showed that the lightest and darkest shades of skin color were assigned significantly more high status occupational level responses than three intermediate shades of skin color (p < .01). Skin color was perceived as a bipolar phenomenon with the unanchored excluded middle relegated to the lowest occupational levels. Post-experimental inquires showed that subjects who knew or may have known the purpose of the experiment gave socially desired responses and assigned the most number of high status responses to the darkest shade of skin color. The author inferred from the results of this study that evaluation apprehension--an intense concern by subjects with how their responses would be judged by others--not only operated in this study, but currently operates in the labor market. Employers may hire persons with extremely dark skin color in order to affirm socially desirable responses. If employers were to operate in terms of these findings and interpretations, then persons with extremely light and extremely dark shades of skin color would be hired in favor of persons with intermediate shades of skin color. Further research evaluating this possibility would seem warranted.