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

Abstract

<jats:p> Researchers have used social dominance, system justification, authoritarianism, and social identity theories to understand how monoracial perceivers’ sociopolitical motives influence their categorization of multiracial people. The result has been a growing understanding of how particular sociopolitical motives and contexts affect categorization, without a unifying perspective to integrate these insights. We review evidence supporting each theory’s predictions concerning how monoracial perceivers categorize multiracial people who combine their ingroup with an outgroup, with attention to the moderating role of perceiver group status. We find most studies cannot arbitrate between theories of categorization and reveal additional gaps in the literature. To advance this research area, we introduce the sociopolitical motive × intergroup threat model of racial categorization that (a) clarifies which sociopolitical motives interact with which intergroup threats to predict categorization and (b) highlights the role of perceiver group status. Furthermore, we consider how our model can help understand phenomena beyond multiracial categorization. </jats:p>

A review of White‐centering practices in multiracial research in social psychology

“…While individualism highlights individual prejudices (see Ho et al, 2020), it also masks the influence of systemic racism (Bonilla-Silva, 1997). For instance, when multiracial Black defendants in court are recognized as Black by the judge and jury, they are treated in ways consistent with the racist judicial punishment that Black monoracial people experience (Hernández, 2017), such as harsher sentencing than White defendants (Mustard, 2001).…”

Chicago Face Database: Multiracial expansion

“…This strategy may be problematic, however, because a maximally racially ambiguous face could be perceived as always White by one subset of raters and always Black by another subset, but the data are often collapsed at the target level, which could obscure such a pattern and undermine the goal of selecting faces that are at the cusp of being one race or another. Additionally, defining multiracialism in terms of racial ambiguity is problematic because even racially ambiguous faces are not always perceived as multiracial (Chen & Hamilton, 2012;Chen, Pauker, Gaither, Hamilton, & Sherman, 2018;Ho Kteily, & Chen, 2020). Moreover, just as social perception research demonstrates wide variability among monoracial faces (Ma, Correll, & Wittenbrink, 2015;Strom, Zebrowitz, Zhang, Bronstad, & Lee, 2012), multiracial faces possess significant featural variation that may or may not encompass racial ambiguity (Chen, Norman, & Nam, 2020).…”

Broadening the stimulus set: Introducing the American Multiracial Faces Database

“…Over the last decade or so, researchers have begun to investigate the perception of Multiracial faces, covering a range of topics such as racial categorization, evaluation, and person memory. These studies have produced novel insights not only about how Multiracial individuals may be perceived and treated, but also about lay theories and assumptions surrounding race (see Chen, 2019;Ho et al, 2020;. Nevertheless, the generalizability and growth of this research area has been hampered by reliance on a small and narrow set of stimuli.…”

“…It is important to note that our aim was to provide faces of actual people with a mixed-race background, regardless of whether they are perceived as Multiracial or not. Past research indicates that there are both perceiver-and target-driven reasons that inhibit the extent to which others perceive faces, even highly ambiguous ones, to be Multiracial (see Chen & Hamilton, 2012;Chen et al, 2018;Ho et al, 2020). Therefore, we sought to increase the number of real Multiracial faces without regard to how they are perceived by others.…”