Natural Ambiguities? Perceptions of Multiracial Individuals by Monoracial Perceivers

Natural Ambiguities? Perceptions of Multiracial Individuals by Monoracial Perceivers

SPSP 2010
The Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology
2010-01-28 through 2010-01-30
Las Vegas, Nevada

Jacqueline Chen
University of California, Santa Barbara

David Hamilton, Professor of Psychology
University of Californi, Santa Barbara

Understanding Multiracial person perception is becoming increasingly important in today’s diverse society. The present research investigates the nature of the racial categorization of Multiracials. We hypothesize that, due to the legacy of the Black-White dichotomy and the automaticity of monoracial categorization, perceivers will make more errors in categorizing Multiracials and that categorization as “Multiracial” will take longer than monoracial categorizations such as “Black” or “White.” Using a novel categorization task, we find support for these hypotheses in two studies. In addition, in Study 2, we demonstrate that cognitive load detrimentally affects Multiracial, but not monoracial, categorizations. Importantly, in both studies, perceivers are able to categorize Multiracials at a rate significantly above chance, suggesting that monoracial perceivers can perceive multiracialism relatively quickly and accurately. Implications and future directions are discussed.

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