Motivation to Control Prejudice Predicts Categorization of Multiracials

Abstract

Virginia, 1967). Since then, interracial marriage in the United States has been steadily growing-in 2010, 15% of new marriages were between persons of different races (Hayes, 2012). As such, it is not surprising that the number of multiracial individuals in the United States is increasing as well, with the most common multiracial background being Black-White multiracial (U.S. Census, 2010). In fact, multiracials are now one of the fastest growing racial groups in the country, yet social psychologists are only beginning to investigate how this population is perceived and ultimately treated.As multiracial individuals gain visibility in American society, they challenge the utility of perceivers' existing racial categorization system. The average perceiver relies heavily on monoracial categories (e.g., Black, White) in person perception, and use of these categories is highly automatic (Chen & Hamilton, 2012;Cunningham et al., 2004;Willadsen-Jensen & Ito, 2006). Furthermore, monoracial categories are typically thought to be mutually exclusive (Hirschfeld, 1996), such that racial categorization of a novel individual consists of asking the question, "Is he Black or White?" However, multiracial individuals often do not offer a straightforward answer to this question. Therefore, perceivers may find the racial categorization of multiracial individuals to be more difficult than the racial categorizations they are accustomed to making (Chen & Hamilton, 2012;Freeman, Pauker, Apfelbaum, & Ambady, 2010).Perceivers may deal with the ambiguity surrounding the categorization of multiracial individuals in a number of ways, and several different motivations may play an important role in these categorization processes. For instance, perceivers often categorize a multiracial target on the basis of his or her lower status racial group, a categorization pattern called hypodescent that has historical and legal precedence in the United Sates

Looking the part (to me): effects of racial prototypicality on race perception vary by prejudice

“…Consistent with work showing that prejudice increases the difficulty of categorizing faces countering race-based expectations (e.g., Blascovich et al , 1997; Hehman et al , 2014), prejudice positively correlated with category competition among prototypically low vs high Black faces. Although IMS marginally also predicted this difference in our second model (as might be expected, see Chen et al , 2014), this relationship only emerged when including ATB. This suggests a critical role of explicit prejudice in predicting category competition for prototypically varying Black faces.…”

“…Indeed, higher IMS perceivers (who often have lower explicit prejudice; Table 1) more likely categorize racially ambiguous faces as multiracial, vs using mono-racial categorization (Chen et al , 2014). Although explicit prejudice corresponded with category competition and ACC activity in the current research, IMS, which is associated with controlling race-biased responses (Amodio et al , 2003), marginally corresponded with category competition, but not ACC activity.…”

An integrative review of impression formation processes for multiracial individuals

“…In contrast, individual differences that involve openness to experience and willingness to consider unconventional ideas may correlate with increased use of the Multiracial category. Chen, Moons, Gaither, Hamilton, and Sherman () found that individuals with strong egalitarian values (Plant & Devine, ) were more likely to make Multiracial categorizations of Black‐White ambiguous faces. This relationship was not explained by egalitarian individuals having increased interracial contact or lower racial prejudice.…”

The iterative nature of person construal: Evidence from event-related potentials

“…For example, conditions of economic scarcity (Rodeheffer et al , 2012; Ho et al , 2013; Krosch and Amodio, 2014), political orientation (Krosch et al , 2013), semantic labels (Tskhay and Rule, 2015) and motivation to be unbiased (Chen et al , 2014) all have been shown to affect the categorization of racially ambiguous faces.…”