I was cruising a conservative political blog this morning and noticed how much darker the photographs of Barack Obama appeared to be there than I am used to seeing in the mainstream press.

Odd, I thought, and tweeted this: have you ever noticed that Obama is BLACKER on conservative political sites? think it’s intentional?

 Not long after, a member of my Twitter Brain Trust, attorney, mediator and consultant Iván Ríos-Mena ~ @IvanRiosMena ~ tweeted back Maybe this explains it… http://j.mp/cHiTgH ~ a link to an article entitled How Light or Dark is Barack Obama’s Skin? Depends on Your Political Stance . . .

Turns out, how light or dark you believe Obama to really be has more to do 

with whether you agree or disagree with him that it has to do with the actual color of his skin (of which I have a pretty good idea, having met the man face to face).

As the article cited by Rios-Mena explains, students who felt aligned with Obama “tended to mentally lighten his skin” in experiments conducted by University of Chicago researcher Eugene Caruso.

Anyone in a mood to attribute this tendency to explicit or implicit bias will be disappointed with Caruso’s results. The student volunteers’ image of Obama as lighter if they agreed with (or voted for) him and darker if they disagreed with (or voted against) him, “remained even after adjusting for racial attitudes, both hidden and explicit.” The choice of lighter or darker photos by the students was so strongly correlated with their approval of Obama that it turned out to be a better indicator of voting choice than were the scores on either of the explicit or implicit bias tests given to them.

Take one or more of Harvard’s implicit bias tests yourself here.

Assuming the vast majority of the student volunteers were “white” (European) the ABC’s of Conflict would attribute the lightening and darkening effects revealed by Professor Caruso’s studies to in- and out-group bias. If we agree with people, we tend to think of them as being more “like us” and when we disagree with them, we like to think of them as different from us ~ the Others.

 No one is color-blind.

So what do we do? We must be mindful of our implicit biases, ask ourselves whether we’re making assumptions about people based on their race, religion, nationality, gender, disability, regional accent, age and the like and then think again. As you’ll see if you take the implicit bias tests yourself, they do not let you think long enough to work against your prejudices. This is why the tests are able to reveal our implicit, or unconscious, biases.

 We do not, however, have to act upon these knee-jerk assumptions because in real life outside of the social science lab, we do have the time to fire up our thinking minds before we judge another human being based upon superficial characteristics.

Ask yourself if your prejudices are likely getting in the way of your better judgment. Don’t let yourself off the hook too quickly but also don’t judge yourself too harshly. Prejudices are a short-cut to establish trust when we do not have the time to investigate. The culture is soaked in negative images of African Americans, Muslims and any other group who happens to be “out.” Stay alert and mind the gap.