An integrative review of impression formation processes for multiracial individuals

Abstract

In approximately 30 years, up to one in five Americans will be mixed race. How monoracial people perceive multiracials will become a critical aspect of race relations in the United States. This demographic shift highlights the need to broaden social psychological theories and investigations to understand multiracial person perception. This article reviews existing research on how people perceive, and remember mixed‐race people, with attention to how these findings contribute to our understanding of racial categorization, impression formation, and intergroup relations. People categorize multiracial people according to the principles of hypodescent (Black + White = Black), the minority bias (Black + White = not White), and by adopting a novel category (Black + White = Multiracial). The particular categorization of a multiracial target depends on several factors, including availability of target information (ancestry, facial appearance), the accessibility of different racial categories, perceiver motives, and the broader cultural context. Downstream implications of these categorization processes are discussed, and future directions are highlighted. Researchers are encouraged to think about race as a multifaceted concept that includes many components (appearance, identity, ancestry, and perceived) that are not necessarily one‐to‐one, especially for mixed‐race individuals.

How Policies Can Address Multiracial Stigma

“…These less essentializing views of race over time, increase egalitarian racial attitudes, foster cognitive flexibility among monoracial populations (Pauker, Carpinella, et al, 2018), and benefit Multiracial health (Sanchez & Garcia, 2009). On the contrary, Multiracial people report identity denial (Albuja et al, 2019b), exposure to stereotypes and marginalization (e.g., Skinner et al, 2019), and experience perceivers applying hypodescent or one-drop rules in their categorization (Chen, 2019). Thus, on the second anniversary of the first U.S. Census to allow check-all-that-apply race options, it is opportune to consider how future policies and reporting practices can better address Multiracial stigma.…”

Introducing the Sociopolitical Motive × Intergroup Threat Model to Understand How Monoracial Perceivers’ Sociopolitical Motives Influence Their Categorization of Multiracial People

“…Thus, although research on perceiver cognitive factors and on features of racially ambiguous targets has yielded invaluable insight into racial categorization processes (see Chen, 2019, for a review of these factors), a perceiver's sociopolitical motives need to be taken into account to more fully explain the mechanisms underlying multiracial categorization. Indeed, one cannot gain a complete understanding of multiracial categorization by focusing exclusively on cognitive factors and without accounting for the sociopolitical functions categorization has served over the course of U.S. history and in contemporary society.…”

Chicago Face Database: Multiracial expansion

“…By this standard, a person is considered multiracial if others conceive of the target as such (Gaither, Chen, Pauker, & Sommers, 2019). Social consensus could be based on either ancestry or physical appearance (Chen, 2019). With respect to physical appearance, social consensus may be determined by whether a target possesses features that are associated with a particular race (e.g., skin tone, eye color, etc.…”

“…Clearly, multiracialism can be conceptualized based on a number of dimensions (Chen, 2019;Roth, 2016) and some have even proposed that ancestry, self-identification, and social perception should all be considered when assessing multiracial status (Woo, Austin, Williams, & Bennett, 2011). Given the many conceptions of multiracialism, it should not come as a surprise that this multifaceted variable has also be operationalized in a variety of ways.…”