Perceived prototypicality of Asian subgroups in the United States and the United Kingdom

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Abstract

Asians are monolithically categorized under one broad racial label despite their diverse compositions (e.g., with national origins from South, East, Southeast, or West Asia). Some Asian subgroups are perceived to be more prototypically Asian than others and cultural contexts may further shape such perception. With historically longstanding presence of East Asians in the United States and South Asians in the United Kingdom, we theorized that the perceived prototypicality of different Asian subgroups in the two countries would reflect these respective historical saliencies. Three studies (N = 849) examined how (non-Asian) Americans and Britons perceived different Asian subgroups in terms of how prototypically Asian and how foreign they seem. Studies 1 and 2 found that compared to British participants, Americans perceived East and Southeast Asians as more prototypically Asian; Britons considered South Asians as more prototypically Asian than American participants. Study 3 showed that Americans perceived East and Southeast Asians to be less foreign and more prototypically American than South and West Asians; in contrast, Britons perceived South Asians to be less foreign and more prototypically British than all other Asian subgroups. This research demonstrates the importance of disaggregating Asian subgroups and contextualizing prototype theories within sociohistorical frameworks.

Introduction

Asian Americans are the fastest growing race in the United States (US), while Asian British are the largest racial minority group in the United Kingdom (UK); it is estimated that there are approximately 23 million Asian Americans (7% of the US population) and 4.2 million (7.5% of the UK population) Asian British (Office for National Statistics, 2020; Pew Research Center, 2021). However, the monolithic category of the Asian label conceals the diversity of the Asian American and British populations. In the US (based on the 2019 US Census American Community Survey), 5.4 million Chinese Americans and 4.6 million Indian Americans represent the two largest Asian subgroups, with Indian Americans projected to surpass Chinese Americans. Beyond these two dominant subgroups, there are 4.2 million Filipino Americans, 2.2 million Vietnamese Americans, 1.9 million Korean Americans, and 1.5 million Japanese Americans (Pew Research Center, 2021). In the UK (based on the 2011 UK Census), South Asian subgroups compose the majority of the Asian British population with 1.4 million Indian British, 1.1 million Pakistani British, and 447,201 Bangladeshi British. Unlike their dominant US counterpart, there are approximately 393,141 Chinese British (Office for National Statistics, 2020). These diverse Asian subgroups differ not only on national origins, but also religions, social economic status, languages, phenotypes, and so much more.

Despite their heterogeneity, Asians are often regarded as one large, all-encompassing group. Asians are stereotyped to “look all the same” and as perpetual foreigners who do not belong in the US or the UK (Flores & Huo, 2012; Huynh, Devos, & Smalarz, 2011; Sue, Bucceri, Lin, Nadal, & Torino, 2007; West, 2019). Major social psychological and sociological theories further paint Asians with broad strokes that ignore the diverse experiences of the Asian subgroups, let alone in-depth examination of potential differences between different nations and cultures (J. Lee & Ramakrishnan, 2020). The current research, therefore, examines how Asian subgroups are perceived in the US and the UK. Specifically, we examine how (non-Asian) American and British participants perceive different Asian subgroups in terms of their resemblance and fit under the “Asian” and “citizenship” prototypes.

Three studies focused on the perceived prototypicality of East Asians (e.g., Asians with Chinese or Korean heritage and features) and South Asians (e.g., Asians with Indian or Pakistani heritage and features). Studies 2 and 3 further included Southeast Asians (e.g., Asians with Vietnamese or Filipino heritage and features) and West Asians (e.g., those with Arab or Iranian heritage and features). West Asia geographically covers Middle Eastern and Arab nations, and we use West Asians broadly to encompass people with such heritage. We acknowledge that groupings based on geographic regions do not fully capture the diversity and complexity of the Asian populations in both the UK and the US. This is complicated by difficulty in categorizing South and West Asians, especially in the US. “Brown” people pose particular challenges to racial categorization because they do not fit into the Black-White racial binary that Americans are more familiar with (Kibria, 1996; Thangaraj, 2015; Zopf, 2018). Instead, Arabs and Middle Easterners (and South Asians) are often conflated and racialized into an ambiguous “Arab-Middle Eastern-Muslim” category (Cainkar, 2018; Naber, 2000). Although Middle Easterners are formally categorized as White on the US Census, American lay perceivers do not consider them as such (Chaney, Sanchez, & Saud, 2021). Therefore, we deemed it necessary to create such geographic groupings in our research to disambiguate the complexity of racial constructions.

Given the rich diversity of the Asian populations, perceivers must thus rely on mental shortcuts and heuristics to simplify the racial group. Social prototypes are heuristics that people use to organize complex social groups such as gender and race into simpler, overarching mental representations (Brewer, 1988; Rosch, 1978; Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher, & Wetherell, 1987). Prototypes are culturally and contextually determinant and they are informed by numeric representations as well as familiarity with the group (Dotsch, Hassin, & Todorov, 2016; Hogg, 1993; Lei & Rhodes, 2021; Rosch, 1978; Vogel, Ingendahl, & Winkielman, 2021). For instance, women vary considerably in race, physical features, and psychological traits, but some women (e.g., White and stereotypically feminine women) are seen as more prototypical and representative of the female gender group than others (e.g., Black women, masculine women) in most Western societies (Lei, Leshin, & Rhodes, 2020; Purdie-Vaughns & Eibach, 2008; Thomas, Dovidio, & West, 2014). Those that deviate from the prototypical image of their social groups are often disliked, forgotten, punished, or discredited (Goh, Bandt-Law, Cheek, Sinclair, & Kaiser, 2021; Phelan & Rudman, 2010; Purdie-Vaughns & Eibach, 2008; Schug, Alt, Lu, Gosin, & Fay, 2017; Sesko & Biernat, 2010; Vogel et al., 2021).

For Asian prototypes, East Asians are seen as more “Asian” than South Asians and Southeast Asians in the US; Southeast Asians are also considered to be more prototypically Asian than South Asians (J. Lee & Ramakrishnan, 2020; Ocampo, 2016; Park, 2008). While all Asian Americans perceive their own groups to be Asians, South Asians are consistently excluded from this racial label by perceivers who identify as White, Black, Latinx, East Asian, and Southeast Asian; all groups agree that East Asians best represent the Asian label (J. Lee & Ramakrishnan, 2020). Arabs are not considered as Asian by all respondents as well, but interestingly Pakistanis and Arabs are both perceived to be equally unfitting of the Asian label (J. Lee & Ramakrishnan, 2020). West Asians (broadly including Arabs and Middle Easterners) pose a particular challenge for social categorization. Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) Americans are considered White on the US Census, but Chaney, Sanchez, & Saud, 2021 demonstrated that labelling White faces with MENA nationalities such as Iranian and Lebanese (as opposed to European nationalities) reduced the perceived Whiteness of the faces.

Evidence thus suggests that West and South Asians are positioned the farthest from the Asian label in the US, with East Asians as the prototype then followed by Southeast Asians (J. Lee & Ramakrishnan, 2020; Park, 2008). Because of this dominant East Asian prototype in the US, other Asian subgroups may feel unseen or dismissed (Flores & Huo, 2012; Ocampo, 2016) or they are treated differently than East Asians (Kuo, Kraus, & Richeson, 2020; Lu, Nisbett, & Morris, 2020). To our knowledge, the Asian prototype in the UK has not been examined.

Because prototypes are culturally determined, who is considered prototypical in one context may not necessarily generalize to another (Turner et al., 1987). In their review of social categorizations, Kawakami, Hugenberg, & Dunham (2020) noted that “a culture or nation's history can have a large impact on determinants of social categorization and the cultural significance of specific categories” (p. 26). Kawakami et al. (2020) provided the example of the Irish immigrants who were once considered distinct from the White racial group, yet over time, Irish immigrants became racialized as White (for more details, see Jacobson, 1999). This demonstrates that race is not biologically based but rather it is socially constructed and context-dependent. As such, Asian subgroups could be perceived differently in the US and the UK. Specifically, we propose that East Asians are perceived to be the prototypical Asians in the US, which confirms previous literature (Kuo, Kraus, & Richeson, 2020; J. Lee & Ramakrishnan, 2020; Ocampo, 2016; Park, 2008). In contrast, we argue that South Asians are considered the prototype of Asians in the UK. This divergence in prototypicality can be explained by the historical presence of Asians in the two countries.

The history of Asian Americans primarily centers on East Asian Americans (for a detailed review, see E. Lee, 2015). The earliest mass migrations from Asia were Chinese and Japanese laborers who built the railroads and worked in various low-wage and dangerous positions. Governmental sanctions against Asian Americans and immigrants also targeted East Asians such as the Chinese Exclusion Act and the internment camps that unjustly displaced Japanese Americans. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 ushered in a new wave of Asian immigrants, allowing highly-skilled Asian immigrants to seek graduate and medical degrees in the US and they established the modern generations of Asian Americans. This Act also allowed South Asians entries for the first time in large numbers and shifted the Asian American demographic. Today, Chinese Americans remain the largest Asian subgroup and Indian Americans are the second largest ethnic group. Despite their recent growth, South Asian Americans have a much shorter historical representation than East Asian Americans.

In contrast, South Asians have historically and numerically dominated the Asian category in the UK (Office for National Statistics, 2020). British imperialism looms over almost all aspect of British history in respect to Asian migration (for a detailed history, see Benton & Gomez, 2008; Visram, 2002). Deemed the British Empire's Jewel in the Crown, the Indian subcontinent was fundamentally shaped by its occupation until the Partition of India in 1947. During the British Raj, indentured servitude (as sailors, laborers, nannies, soldiers) transported South Asians throughout the British Empire and into the UK. After WWII, the Partition of India and the Chinese Civil War brought refugees into the UK because its immigration policy then had allowed citizens of the Commonwealth and former colonies unrestricted entries into the UK until 1962. British labor shortage in the 1950s and 60s further saw massive chain migration of laborers from South Asia and Hong Kong. As immigration policies tightened in the 1960s, Asian British families in the UK proliferated and they built the modern multiracial British population.

Given these historical differences of the two countries, East Asians may be perceived as the prototypical Asian in the US but South Asians may be favored as the prototypical representation in the UK.

Beyond the prototype of a particular racial group, there are also prototypes of larger cultures or nations. White Americans are deemed the most prototypical Americans, and Asian Americans are perceived to be less prototypically American than Black and White Americans (Devos & Banaji, 2005; Yogeeswaran & Dasgupta, 2010). Non-prototypical group members are considered to be outsiders and deemed less deserving of belonging in certain spaces (Cheryan & Monin, 2005; Cheryan, Ziegler, Montoya, & Jiang, 2017; Zou & Cheryan, 2017). In both the US and the UK, Asians are perceived to be “perpetual foreigners” who do not belong and cannot assimilate into the American and British societies (Benton & Gomez, 2008; Huynh et al., 2011; Kim, 1999; Zou & Cheryan, 2017). This is exemplified during World War II when Japanese Americans' loyalty and belonging in the US were challenged to such an extent that they were forced into internment camps (E. Lee, 2015). In essence, Asian Americans and Asian British are perceived as less prototypically American/ British and as perpetual foreigners in their own homes.

It is unclear how the stereotype of perpetual foreigners extends to different Asian subgroups. Because prototypes usually hold numeric representation and familiarity within a particular culture given their historical presence, they would likely be considered as less foreign than non-prototypical members who have shorter historical opportunities to socially integrate. It is, therefore, possible that certain subgroups may be deemed more foreign than others due to their distance from the Asian prototype. Since the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, Arab Americans and other Middle Easterners were racialized as a distinctive dangerous “Brown” racial group in the US and the September 11 terrorist attack further stereotyped Arabs, South Asians, and Middle Easterners uniformly as terrorists who are perceived not simply as foreign but as entirely un-American (Cainkar, 2018; Hitlan, Carrillo, Zárate, & Aikman, 2007; Zopf, 2018; Zou & Cheryan, 2017). In contrast, South Asians have longstanding history in the UK and therefore may not be perceived as foreign as other Asian subgroups (Visram, 2002).

Disaggregating Asian subgroups may provide further insights into who may be considered as a prototypical American/ British citizen or as a perpetual foreigner. We argue that the perpetual foreigner stereotype may target some subgroups more so than others but this is dependent on the cultural contexts. South Asians' longstanding history, numeric representation, and recognized familiarity within the UK may lead them to be seen as less foreign and more prototypically British than other Asians. In contrast, East Asians' enduring presence in the US may lead them to be seen as less foreign and more prototypically American relative to South Asians who are stereotyped as anti-American terrorists and have a shorter historical presence.

The prototypes of Asians in the US and the UK may diverge due to historical Asian migrations in the two countries that contributed to different numeric representations. In the US, East Asians have traditionally represented the Asian group; whereas in the UK, South Asians hold a consistently larger social and numeric representations. Given their distinctive histories, (non-Asian) Americans and Britons would likely hold divergent conceptions about how well each Asian subgroup fit the prototypical image of Asians and the prototypical image of citizen or foreigner in the US and the UK. Study 1 examined the extent to which South and East Asian faces are perceived as prototypically Asian by Americans and Britons. Study 2 asked all participants to rate a list of Asian subgroups (from East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and West Asia) on their perceived Asian prototypicality. Finally, Study 3 examined the perceived foreignness (and the prototypicality of citizenships) of Asian subgroups in the US and the UK. We predicted that compared to Britons, Americans would perceive East Asians as more Asian and less foreign. Contrastingly, Britons would perceive South Asians as more Asian and less foreign than Americans. Studies 2 and 3 also included Southeast and West Asians to further explore differences in perceived prototypicality.

This research advances social psychological theories in several ways. First, we provide an in-depth examination of a racial group that is understudied and demonstrate that extant theoretical generalizations require a more nuanced and disaggregated approach. Second, we advance prototype theories by directly testing how prototypical representations of social groups can diverge considerably in two seemingly similar contexts. We achieve this by grounding our prototype frameworks within historical contexts. Given the particular ahistorical approach of our field (Gergen, 1973; Muthukrishna, Henrich, & Slingerland, 2021; Trawalter, Bart-Plange, & Hoffman, 2020), this research demonstrates that cultural histories can inform basic social processes (Kawakami et al., 2020).

We report all measures, manipulations, and exclusions in these studies. All data, material, and pre-registrations are available on Open Science Framework (OSF) here: https://osf.io/rksmu/

Section snippets

Study 1

Study 1 provided the first demonstration that Americans and Britons diverged in how they perceived the prototypicality of South and East Asians. Study 1 used naturalistic photographs of South Asians, East Asians, and White people. White targets were included because they are seen as the national prototype in the two countries (Devos & Banaji, 2005; Hansen, 2000) and thus provide relevant comparisons for the two Asian subgroups. We pre-registered that Americans (relative to Britons) would

Study 2

Extending Study 1, Study 2 provided a list of Asian subgroups rather than using photographs. American and British participants rated the Asian prototypicality of 12 groups that fell under four Asian geographic regions (i.e., East Asians, South Asians, Southeast Asians, and West Asians). We predicted that British participants would be more likely to classify South Asians as Asian compared to American participants, but Americans would perceive East Asians as more prototypically Asian than British

Study 3

Studies 1 and 2 examined the prototype of the Asian racial group, and Study 3 extended these studies by examining the prototypes of the larger American and British societies. Study 3 focused on the perpetual foreigner stereotype, a potential consequence for subgroups that deviate from the prototypical group representation. Study 3 used a continuum of foreignness-citizenship as one bipolar dimension, with lower scores representing greater perceived foreignness and higher scores representing

General discussion

We theorized that non-Asian Americans and Britons would diverge in how they perceive the prototypicality of Asian subgroups, and this divergence in prototypicality would reflect the historical salience of different Asian subgroups in the US and the UK. Asian American history predominantly concerned East Asians, but Asian migration in the UK largely centered on South Asians. This was empirically confirmed in three studies. Americans perceived East Asians to be more prototypically Asian and less

Conclusion

The pan-Asian movement coined the “Asian American” label in order to coalesce and advocate for the diverse Asian communities (Okamoto, 2014). Yet over time, the Asian American label has shifted to be primarily associated with East Asians in the US likely due to their historical dominance in the US (J. Lee & Ramakrishnan, 2020). In contrast, South Asian British are perceived to be prototypical Asians and citizens due to their longstanding presence in the UK. Although the US and the UK are

Open practices

All three studies were pre-registered, with open data and materials. All data, material, and pre-registration forms are provided at the following Open Science Framework link: https://osf.io/rksmu/?view_only=a9ff497849a542398e0a72fdbb3e0be0

Acknowledgement

The authors thank Annie Hikido, Ryan Lei, A. Chyei Vinluan, and Linda Zou for their helpful feedback on earlier versions of the manuscript.

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    This paper has been recommended for acceptance by Professor Michael Kraus.

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