No abstract

The current research tested whether the passing of government legislation, signaling the prevailing attitudes of the local majority, was associated with changes in citizens’ attitudes. Specifically, with ∼1 million responses over a 12-y window, we tested whether state-by-state same-sex marriage legislation was associated with decreases in antigay implicit and explicit bias. Results across five operationalizations consistently provide support for this possibility. Both implicit and explicit bias were decreasing before same-sex marriage legalization, but decreased at a sharper rate following legalization. Moderating this effect was whether states passed legislation locally. Although states passing legislation experienced a greater decrease in bias following legislation, states that never passed legislation demonstrated increased antigay bias following federal legalization. Our work highlights how government legislation can inform individuals’ attitudes, even when these attitudes may be deeply entrenched and socially and politically volatile.

The present research examined cultural differences in the type and frequency of support provided as well as the motivations underlying these behaviors. Study 1, an open-ended survey, asked participants about their social interactions in the past 24 hours and found that European Americans reported providing emotion-focused support more frequently than problem-focused support, whereas Japanese exhibited the opposite pattern. Study 2, a closed-ended questionnaire study, found that, in response to the close other's big stressor, European Americans provided more emotion-focused support whereas Japanese provided equivalent amounts of emotion-focused and problem-focused support. In addition, Study 2 examined motivational explanations for these differences. Social support provision was motivated by the goal of closeness and increasing recipient self-esteem among European Americans, but only associated with the motive for closeness among Japanese. These studies illustrate the importance of considering cultural context and its role in determining the meaning and function of various support behaviors.

Research on multiracial categorization has focused on majority group social perceivers (i.e., White Americans), demonstrating that they (a) typically categorize Black-White multiracials according to a rule of hypodescent, associating them more with their lower status parent group than their higher status parent group, and (b) do so at least in part to preserve the hierarchical status quo. The current work examines whether members of an ethnic minority group, Black Americans, also associate Black-White multiracials more with their minority versus majority parent group and if so, why. The first 2 studies (1A and 1B) directly compared Black and White Americans, and found that although both Blacks and Whites categorized Black-White multiracials as more Black than White, Whites' use of hypodescent was associated with intergroup antiegalitarianism, whereas Blacks' use of hypodescent was associated with intergroup egalitarianism. Studies 2-3 reveal that egalitarian Blacks use hypodescent in part because they perceive that Black-White biracials face discrimination and consequently feel a sense of linked fate with them. This research establishes that the use of hypodescent extends to minority as well as majority perceivers but also shows that the beliefs associated with the use of hypodescent differ as a function of perceiver social status. In doing so, we broaden the social scientific understanding of hypodescent, showing how it can be an inclusionary rather than exclusionary phenomenon. (PsycINFO Database Record

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

Culture shapes the meaning of race and, consequently, who is placed into which racial categories. Three experiments conducted in the United States and Brazil illustrated the cultural nature of racial categorization. In Experiment 1, a target’s racial ancestry influenced Americans’ categorizations but had no impact on Brazilians’ categorizations. Experiment 2 showed cultural differences in the reliance on two phenotypic cues to race; Brazilians’ categorizations were more strongly determined by skin tone than were Americans’ categorizations, and Americans’ categorizations were more strongly determined by other facial features compared to Brazilians' categorizations. Experiment 3 demonstrated cultural differences in the motivated use of racial categories. When the racial hierarchy was threatened, only Americans more strictly enforced the Black–White racial boundary. Cultural forces shape the conceptual, perceptual, and ideological construal of racial categories.

Race and gender categories, although long presumed to be perceived independently, are inextricably tethered in social perception due in part to natural confounding of phenotypic cues. We predicted that target gender would affect race categorizations. Consistent with this hypothesis, feminine faces compelled White categorizations, and masculine faces compelled Asian or Black categorizations of racially ambiguous targets (Study 1), monoracial targets (Study 2), and real facial photographs (Study 3). The efficiency of judgments varied concomitantly. White categorizations were rendered more rapidly for feminine, relative to masculine faces, but the opposite was true for Asian and Black categorizations (Studies 1-3). Moreover, the effect of gender on categorization efficiency was compelled by racial phenotypicality for Black targets (Study 3). Finally, when targets' race prototypicality was held constant, gender still influenced race categorizations (Study 4). These findings indicate that race categorizations are biased by presumably unrelated gender cues.

We investigated Asian Americans’ perceptions of Asian–White biracials. Because the Asian/White boundary may be more permeable than other minority/White boundaries, we reasoned that Asian Americans are more likely than Black Americans to be skeptical of biracials, perceiving that biracials would prefer to identify as White and would be disloyal to Asians, consequently categorizing them as more outgroup. We further reasoned that Asian Americans’ concerns about and exclusion of biracials would be predicted by greater perceived discrimination against Asian Americans, which increases the incentive for biracials to pass into the higher status racial group. Studies 1 and 2 provided correlational support for these theorized relationships among Asian Americans. Study 2 showed that perceived discrimination did not increase Black Americans’ concerns about biracials’ identity preferences and loyalty. Studies 3 and 4 provided causal evidence for the roles of perceived discrimination and biracial identity preferences, respectively, in Asian Americans’ exclusion of biracials.