Asian Scientist (Aug. 5, 2013) – Multiracial people may be misidentified more often as being white than black and may value being accurately identified more so than single-race individuals. This is according to two new studies that were presented at the American Psychological Association’s 121st Annual Convention last week.
“Today, the distinctions among white, black, Latino and Asian people are becoming blurred by the increasing frequency and prominence of multiracial people,” said Dr Jacqueline M. Chen, who presented the first of the studies.
“Still, average Americans have difficulty identifying multiracial people who don’t conform to the traditional single-race categories that society has used all their lives.”
Chen discussed six experiments involving 435 ethnically diverse undergraduate students at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
In each of the experiments, participants were consistently less likely to identify people as multiracial than single-race. They also took longer to identify someone as multiracial compared to how easily they identified black, white and Asian people.
Furthermore, when they made incorrect identifications, they were consistently more likely to categorize a multiracial person as white than black.
According to the study, some factors which made observers significantly less likely to identify someone as multiracial include: time pressure, distractions and thinking of race in either-or terms.
Scientists agree that the racial categories we use today are not based on biological differences but are social constructions that can change over time, Chen said, noting that until the mid-20th century, the Anglo-Saxon majority in the United States viewed Irish and Italian immigrants as different races.
Previous research has found that people who identify as multiracial have as many as or more positive experiences than those who identify with a single race, regardless of that group’s status in society, she said.
In the second study, Dr Jessica D. Remedios looked at how multiracial people value the accuracy of another person’s perception of their race.
“Our research found that multiracial people expect positive interactions with people who accurately perceive their racial backgrounds because that affirms their self-perceptions,” said Remedios.
She described an experiment in which researchers took photos of participants and told them they would trade the photo with a participant located in another room.
The person in the other room was actually fictional, and each participant received a photo of a white male and was asked to identify his race on a form with a list of several races and a place to add comments.
The participants then read comments the researchers had developed for the fictional participant who they thought had viewed their photo and they completed a questionnaire to assess their interest in meeting that person.
Another experiment did the same, but showed participants photos of a white man or woman and added questions to determine whether the participants were surprised by accurate or inaccurate identifications and how they felt about themselves after reading the other participant’s comments.
The researchers found that multiracial participants were more interested in meeting partners who had accurately identified them. Furthermore, single-race people were surprised but multiracial people were not when their race was not accurately identified.
Multiracial and single-race people had similar negative reactions to being misidentified, but only multiracial participants indicated an accurate identification would support their self-image, whereas there was no effect on self-image among the single-race participants.
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Source: APA; Photo: Victor1558.
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