Development and validation of the SAFE (Socially Ascribed intersectional identities For Equity) questionnaire

Traditional questionnaires do not capture the complexity of how people are viewed by others and grouped into categories on the basis of what is inferred (or not) about them. This is critical in applying an intersectionality framework in research because people are negatively impacted because of "who they are" but also based on "how others see them." The purpose of this project was to develop and validate a questionnaire, grounded in intersectionality theory and a nuanced understanding of social position, that can be applied in large-scale, population-based surveys and studies. Drawing on 61 existing quantitative surveys collecting identity-based information and 197 qualitative studies on intersectionality describing the complex ways in which people's social positions are constructed and experienced, we created a draft questionnaire comprising five parts: 1) Sex and Gender, 2) Sexuality and Sexual Orientation, 3) Cultural Context, 4) Disability, Health, and Physical Characteristics, and 5) Socioeconomic Status. A draft of the questionnaire was then reviewed by experts via the Delphi process, which gauged the accessibility of the questionnaire (e.g., language used, length) and the relevance of its content using a 5-point scale and open-ended questions. These responses were ranked, analyzed, and synthesized to refine the questionnaire and, ultimately, to obtain ≥75 % consensus on each questionnaire item and response option. The SAFE questionnaire provides an opportunity to take a significant step forward in advancing our understanding of the complex, intersectional nature of social participation and marginalization.

Beyond categories: Perceiving sexual attraction from faces

Although people can categorize others' sexual orientation (e.g., gay/lesbian vs. straight) from their facial appearance, not everyone defines their sexual orientation categorically. Indeed, many individuals within the same sexual orientation category experience different degrees of own- and other-gender attraction. Moving beyond sexual orientation categories, we found that perceivers' judgments of individuals' sexual attraction correlated with those individuals' self-reported degrees of attraction to women and men. Similar to past work on sexual orientation categories, facial affect cued sexual attraction in men whereas gender typicality cued sexual attraction in women. Moreover, asking participants to categorize the targets as 'not straight' versus 'straight' revealed a linear pattern distinct from the discrete category thresholds typical of other social groups (e.g., race). Facial appearance thus reveals nuances in sexual attraction that support sexual orientation categorizations. These findings refine understanding of social categorization more broadly.

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.

White Categorical Ambiguity: Exclusion of Middle Eastern Americans From the White Racial Category

Despite legal classification as White, Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) Americans experience high levels of discrimination, suggesting low social status precludes them from accessing the White racial category. After first demonstrating that the rated Whiteness of MENA Americans influences support for discriminatory policies (Study 1), the present research explores ratings and perceptions of Whiteness of MENA Americans by demonstrating how MENA ethnicities shift racial categorization of prototypically White and racially ambiguous targets (Studies 2–4), and how MENA Americans’ social status influences rated Whiteness (Study 5). As few studies have explored the relative Whiteness of different ethnicities in the United States despite the fluid history of the White racial category, the present studies have implications for the processes that inform White categorization and lay categorizations of MENA Americans.

The sampling precision of research in five major areas of psychology

After obtaining a sample of published, peer-reviewed articles from journals with high and low impact factors in social, cognitive, neuro-, developmental, and clinical psychology, we used a priori equations recently derived by Trafimow (Educational and Psychological Measurement, 77, 831-854, 2017; Trafimow & MacDonald in Educational and Psychological Measurement, 77, 204-219, 2017) to compute the articles' median levels of precision. Our findings indicate that developmental research performs best with respect to precision, whereas cognitive research performs the worst; however, none of the psychology subfields excelled. In addition, we found important differences in precision between journals in the upper versus lower echelons with respect to impact factors in cognitive, neuro-, and clinical psychology, whereas the difference was dramatically attenuated for social and developmental psychology. Implications are discussed.

The iterative nature of person construal: Evidence from event-related potentials

Recently, a dynamic-interactive model of person construal (DI model) has been proposed, whereby the social categories a person represents are determined on the basis of an iterative integration of bottom-up and top-down influences. The current study sought to test this model by leveraging the high temporal resolution of event-related brain potentials (ERPs) as 65 participants viewed male faces that varied by race (White vs Black), fixating either between the eyes or on the forehead. Within face presentations, the effect of fixation, meant to vary bottom-up visual input, initially was large but decreased across early latency neural responses identified by a principal components analysis (PCA). In contrast, the effect of race, reflecting a combination of top-down and bottom-up factors, initially was small but increased across early latency principal components. These patterns support the DI model prediction that bottom-up and top-down processes are iteratively integrated to arrive at a stable construal within 230 ms. Additionally, exploratory multilevel modeling of single trial ERP responses representing a component linked to outgroup categorization (the P2) suggests change in effects of the manipulations over the course of the experiment. Implications of the findings for the DI model are considered.

Social Categorization From Faces: Evidence From Obvious and Ambiguous Groups

People use facial features (e.g., face shape, skin color, eye structure) both in isolation and in combination to identify others as members of a variety of social categories. For some categories (e.g., age, race, and sex), the markers are obvious and people categorize their members almost perfectly. For others, however (e.g., political affiliation, religious following, and sexual orientation), the markers are ambiguous, yet people can still categorize members of these groups with better than chance accuracy and little effort or awareness. Here, we describe how people categorize others into both perceptually obvious and perceptually ambiguous social groups from their faces, discussing potential mechanisms that may underlie categorization accuracy and noting some of the social consequences that result from categorizing other people into groups.

More Than Meets the Eye: Split-Second Social Perception

Recent research suggests that visual perception of social categories is shaped not only by facial features but also by higher-order social cognitive processes (e.g., stereotypes, attitudes, goals). Building on neural computational models of social perception, we outline a perspective of how multiple bottom-up visual cues are flexibly integrated with a range of top-down processes to form perceptions, and we identify a set of key brain regions involved. During this integration, 'hidden' social category activations are often triggered which temporarily impact perception without manifesting in explicit perceptual judgments. Importantly, these hidden impacts and other aspects of the perceptual process predict downstream social consequences - from politicians' electoral success to several evaluative biases - independently of the outcomes of that process.

A Perceptual Pathway to Bias: Interracial Exposure Reduces Abrupt Shifts in Real-Time Race Perception That Predict Mixed-Race Bias

In two national samples, we examined the influence of interracial exposure in one's local environment on the dynamic process underlying race perception and its evaluative consequences. Using a mouse-tracking paradigm, we found in Study 1 that White individuals with low interracial exposure exhibited a unique effect of abrupt, unstable White-Black category shifting during real-time perception of mixed-race faces, consistent with predictions from a neural-dynamic model of social categorization and computational simulations. In Study 2, this shifting effect was replicated and shown to predict a trust bias against mixed-race individuals and to mediate the effect of low interracial exposure on that trust bias. Taken together, the findings demonstrate that interracial exposure shapes the dynamics through which racial categories activate and resolve during real-time perceptions, and these initial perceptual dynamics, in turn, may help drive evaluative biases against mixed-race individuals. Thus, lower-level perceptual aspects of encounters with racial ambiguity may serve as a foundation for mixed-race prejudice.