At face value: Psychological outcomes differ for real vs. computer-generated multiracial faces

Hypodescent or ingroup overexclusion?: Children's and adults' racial categorization of ambiguous black/white biracial faces

Two processes describe racially ambiguous Black/White Biracial categorization-the one-drop rule, or hypodescent, whereby racially ambiguous people are categorized as members of their socially subordinated racial group (i.e., Black/White Biracial faces categorized as Black) and the ingroup overexclusion effect, whereby racially ambiguous people are categorized as members of a salient outgroup, regardless of the group's status. Without developmental research with racially diverse samples, it is unclear when these categorization patterns emerge. Study 1 included White, Black, and racially diverse Biracial children (aged 3- to 7-years) and their parents to test how racial group membership and social context influence face categorization biases. To provide the clearest test of hypodescent and ingroup overexclusion, White participants came from majority White neighborhoods and Black participants from majority Black neighborhoods (with Biracial participants from more racially diverse neighborhoods)-two samples with prominent racial ingroups. Study 2 aimed to replicate the parent findings with a separate sample of White, Black, Black/White Biracial, and Asian adults. Results suggest the ingroup overexclusion effect is present across populations early in development and persists into adulthood. Additionally, categorization was meaningfully related to parental context, pinpointing a pathway that potentially contributes to ingroup overexclusion. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: White, Black, and racially diverse Biracial children and adults tended to categorize racially ambiguous Black/White Biracial faces as racial outgroup members, even if the outgroup was White. This contradicts most work arguing Black/White Biracial racially ambiguous people are more often seen as Black. Children and parents' categorizations were related, though children's categorizations were not related to socialization above and beyond parents' categorizations. Children showed similar categorization patterns across dichotomous and continuous measures.

Biracial Faces Offer Visual Cues of Successful Intergroup Contact: Genetic Admixture and Coalition Detection

This research explores how biracial facial cues affect racial perception and social judgment. We tested a coalition-signaling hypothesis of biracial cues in two studies conducted in the United States (n = 227) and China (n = 116). From the perspective of intergroup and interpersonal relations theories in social psychology, biracial features would likely be perceived as cues of threat or resource competition. In contrast, we propose an evolutionary hypothesis that biracial facial cues reveal the ancestral history of intergroup alliances between members of two races or ethnic groups. When racial cues are mixed, we predict that biracial individuals may be viewed more positively than other-race or even own-race members who often compete for limited ingroup resources. The participants observed facial images that ranged from 100% Asian to 100% Caucasian, including morphed biracial composites of 30%, 40%, 50%, 60%, and 70% Caucasian or Asian. The participants evaluated each image regarding perceived Caucasianness (Asianness), attractiveness, trustworthiness, health, intelligence, and career prospects. The US and Chinese samples yielded a similar pattern of own-race bias in racial perception and biracial favoritism in social judgment. The social judgment ratings were not correlated with the racial perception scores and were independent of the sex of the participants or biracial images, indicating a coalitional motive, instead of a mating motive, underlying social perception of biracial individuals. Overall, the results suggest that biracial facial features signal a successful genetic admixture and coalition in parental generations and thus increase the trustworthiness and cooperative potential of a biracial person.

Intergroup Context Moderates the Impact of White Americans' Identification on Racial Categorization of Ambiguous Faces

We examined how the number of groups in a categorization task influences how White Americans categorize ambiguous faces. We investigated the strength of identity-driven ingroup overexclusion-wherein highly identified perceivers overexclude ambiguous members from the ingroup-proposing that, compared with dichotomous tasks (with only the ingroup and one outgroup), tasks with more outgroups attenuate identity-driven ingroup overexclusion (a dilution effect). Fourteen studies (n = 4,001) measured White Americans' racial identification and their categorizations of ambiguous faces and manipulated the categorization task to have two groups, three groups, or an unspecified number of groups (open-ended). In all three conditions, participants overexcluded faces from the White category on average. There was limited support for the dilution effect: identity-driven ingroup overexclusion was absent in the three-group task and only weakly supported in the open-ended task. The presence of multiple outgroups may dampen the impact of racial identity on race perceptions among White Americans.

A data-driven, hyper-realistic method for visualizing individual mental representations of faces

Research in person and face perception has broadly focused on group-level consensus that individuals hold when making judgments of others (e.g., “X type of face looks trustworthy”). However, a growing body of research demonstrates that individual variation is larger than shared, stimulus-level variation for many social trait judgments. Despite this insight, little research to date has focused on building and explaining individual models of face perception. Studies and methodologies that have examined individual models are limited in what visualizations they can reliably produce to either noisy and blurry or computer avatar representations. Methods that produce low-fidelity visual representations inhibit generalizability by being clearly computer manipulated and produced. In the present work, we introduce a novel paradigm to visualize individual models of face judgments by leveraging state-of-the-art computer vision methods. Our proposed method can produce a set of photorealistic face images that correspond to an individual's mental representation of a specific attribute across a variety of attribute intensities. We provide a proof-of-concept study which examines perceived trustworthiness/untrustworthiness and masculinity/femininity. We close with a discussion of future work to substantiate our proposed method.

Categorizing a Face and Facing a Category: The Constructive Impacts of Ambiguity and Uncertainty in Racial Categorization

The past generation has seen a dramatic rise in multiracial populations and a consequent increase in exposure to individuals who challenge monolithic racial categories. We examine and compare two potential outcomes of the multiracial population growth that may impact people's racial categorization experience: (a) exposure to racially ambiguous faces that visually challenge the existing categories, and (b) a category that conceptually challenges existing categories (including "biracial" as an option in addition to the monolithic "Black" and "White" categories). Across four studies (N = 1,810), we found that multiple exposures to faces that are racially ambiguous directly lower essentialist views of race. Moreover, we found that when people consider a category that blurs the line between racial categories (i.e., "biracial"), they become less certain in their racial categorization, which is associated with less race essentialism, as well. Importantly, we found that these two effects happen independently from one another and represent two distinct cognitive processes.

Broadening the stimulus set: Introducing the American Multiracial Faces Database

Face-based perceptions form the basis for how people behave towards each other and, hence, are central to understanding human interaction. Studying face perception requires a large and diverse set of stimuli in order to make ecologically valid, generalizable conclusions. To date, there are no publicly available databases with a substantial number of Multiracial or racially ambiguous faces. Our systematic review of the literature on Multiracial person perception documented that published studies have relied on computer-generated faces (84% of stimuli), Black-White faces (74%), and male faces (63%). We sought to address these issues, and to broaden the diversity of available face stimuli, by creating the American Multiracial Faces Database (AMFD). The AMFD is a novel collection of 110 faces with mixed-race heritage and accompanying ratings of those faces by naive observers that are freely available to academic researchers. The faces (smiling and neutral expression poses) were rated on attractiveness, emotional expression, racial ambiguity, masculinity, racial group membership(s), gender group membership(s), warmth, competence, dominance, and trustworthiness. The large majority of the AMFD faces are racially ambiguous and can pass into at least two different racial categories. These faces will be useful to researchers seeking to study Multiracial person perception as well as those looking for racially ambiguous faces in order to study categorization processes in general. Consequently, the AMFD will be useful to a broad group of researchers who are studying face perception.

Are Morphs a Valid Substitute for Real Multiracial Faces in Race Categorization Research?

The rise of the multiracial population has been met with a growing body of research examining multiracial face perception. A common method for creating multiracial face stimuli in past research has been mathematically averaging two monoracial "parent" faces of different races to create computer-generated multiracial morphs, but conclusions from research using morphs will only be accurate to the extent that morphs yield perceptual decisions similar to those that would be made with real multiracial faces. The current studies compared race classifications of real and morphed multiracial face stimuli. We found that oval-masked morphed faces were classified as multiracial significantly more often than oval-masked real multiracial faces (Studies 1 and 2), but at comparable levels to unmasked real multiracial faces (Study 2). Study 3 examined factors that could explain differences in how morphs and real multiracial faces are categorized and pointed to the potential role that unusualness/distinctiveness might play.

Chicago Face Database: Multiracial expansion

Multiracial individuals represent a growing segment of the population and have been increasingly the focus of empirical study. Much of this research centers on the perception and racial categorization of multiracial individuals. The current paper reviews some of this research and describes the different types of stimuli that have been used in these paradigms. We describe the strengths and weaknesses associated with different operationalizations of multiracialism and highlight the dearth of research using faces of real multiracial individuals, which we posit may be due to the lack of available stimuli. Our research seeks to satisfy this need by providing a free set of high-resolution, standardized images featuring 88 real multiracial individuals along with extensive norming data and objective physical measures of these faces. These data are offered as an extension of the widely used Chicago Face Database and are available for download at www.chicagofaces.org for use in research.

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

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.