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Category: Project

Description: Multiracial individuals are often categorized as members of their “socially subordinate” racial group—a form of social discrimination termed hypodescent—with political conservatives more likely than liberals to show this bias. Although hypodescent has been linked to racial hierarchy preservation motives, it remains unclear how political ideology influences categorization: Do conservatives and liberals see, feel, or think about mixed-race faces differently? Do they differ in sensitivity to the Blackness (i.e., skin tone darkness and Afrocentric features) or racial ambiguity (i.e., categorization difficulty) of Black/White mixed-race faces? To help answer these questions, we collected a politically diverse sample of White participants and had them categorize mixed-race individuals as Black or White during functional neuroimaging. We found that conservatism was related to greater anterior insula sensitivity to seeing racially ambiguous faces, and this pattern of brain activation mediated conservatives’ use of hypodescent. This suggests that conservatives differ from liberals in their affective (rather than perceptual or cognitive) reactions to mixed-race faces and that their greater sensitivity to racial ambiguity (rather than Blackness) gives rise to greater categorization of mixed-race individuals into the socially subordinate group. Implications for the study of race categorization and political psychology are discussed.