Dark or Fair? Skin Tone Bias in Personal and Professional Arenas

Skin color bias or colourism is the biased attitude towards the people on the basis of lightness or darkness of the skin. It is a kind of implicit bias that people hold for a group at unconscious level. The present study is carried out to explore the prevalence of skin tone bias (dark or fair) on the basis of traits- attractiveness, friendly, happy, professionally successful, leadership skills, independent, wealthy, sincere, kind and likable. To conduct the study 6 individuals were chosen (4 females & 2 males). Three of them were originally dark complexion and three were of fair complexion based on their self-opinion. Dark skin tone were converted to fair one and Fair skin tone were converted to darker skin tone. So, a total of 12 pictures were there. Two checklists were developed containing those traits. Checklist 1 has 6 mixed pictures (Group 1) of fair and dark skin tone. Checklist 2 has the counterparts (Group 2) of the pictures in checklist 1. These pictures were shown to different individuals. Group 1 set was shown to 92 participants and group 2 was also shown to different set of 92 participants. So, the data of total 184 participants was collected. Chi square was calculated. The results come out to be that fair skin tone are considered favorable by people on the basis of traits like- attractiveness, likable and wealthy than the dark skin tone. Also, there is no significant difference in the way people perceive dark skin tone and fair skin tone individuals on the basis of traits like- friendly, happy, professionally successful, independent, sincere and kind. However, an interesting finding came out to be that on the trait- leadership skills, darker skin tone individuals are perceived favorable than the fair skin tone.