Avoiding minorities: Social invisibility

Three experiments examined how self-consciousness has an impact on the visual exploration of a social field. The main hypothesis was that merely a photograph of people can trigger a dynamic process of social visual interaction such that minority images are avoided when people are in a state of self-reflective consciousness. In all three experiments, pairs of pictures—one with characters of social minorities and one with characters of social majorities—were shown to the participants. By means of eye-tracking technology, the results of Experiment 1 (n=20) confirmed the hypothesis that in the reflective consciousness condition, people look more at the majority than minority characters. The res…