ABSTRACT

Many societies today are organised as race-based social hierarchies, with clear boundaries between racial groups at the top versus bottom. The growth of multiracial populations has been heralded as holding the potential to blur existing group boundaries. But whether multiracial people do blur boundaries depends critically on how monoracial perceivers categorise them. We review our research programme on how monoracial perceivers’ categorisation of multiracials depends on sociopolitical motives. We present the Sociopolitical Motive × Intergroup Threat Model of Racial Categorisation, which describes how sociopolitical motives interact with specific threats to drive multiracial categorisation, and how this depends on perceivers’ group position in the racial status hierarchy. Our empirical work is based on the U.S. context, but we discuss how our research, grounded in theories of intergroup relations that have been tested cross-culturally – social dominance, system justification, authoritarianism, and social identity theories – may apply more broadly.

摘要

今天的许多社会都是以种族为基础的社会等级组织的，在上层和底层的种族群体之间有明确的界限。多种族人口的增长被认为具有模糊现有群体界限的潜力。但是，多种族的人是否确实模糊了界限，这在很大程度上取决于单种族感知者如何对他们进行分类。我们回顾了我们关于单种族感知者对多种族的分类如何取决于社会政治动机的研究计划. 我们提出了种族分类的社会政治动机 × 群体间威胁模型，它描述了社会政治动机如何与特定威胁相互作用以推动多种族分类，以及这如何取决于感知者在种族地位等级中的群体位置。我们的实证工作基于美国的背景，但我们讨论了我们的研究如何以经过跨文化检验的群体间关系理论为基础——社会支配地位、系统正当性、威权主义和社会认同理论——可以更广泛地应用。