Conservatives more likely than liberals to identify mixed-race individuals as Black: Study

Conservatives are more likely than liberals to identify mixed-race individuals as Black, according to a series of new studies.

The studies, carried out by researchers at New York University, findings which appear in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, suggest that there is a link between political ideology and racial categorization.

"A person's race is often thought to be clear-cut and fixed," Amy Krosch, a doctoral student in New York University's Department of Psychology and the lead author of the paper, explained.

"However, our research suggests that the perception of a person as Black or White is related to one's political views and beliefs about equality," he added.

The study also showed a link between nationality and racial classification. The study's U.S. subjects were more likely to identify as Black mixed-race individuals labeled as Americans than they were mixed-race individuals labeled as Canadians.

The study focused on the principle of hypodescent, which posits that multi-racial individuals are categorized according to their most socially subordinate group membership.

In the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology study, the researchers explored the possibility of a connection between political ideology and racial categorization of unknown individuals-and, if so, what might explain this phenomenon.

To do so, they conducted three experiments, two of which included only White American subjects; a third included a racially heterogeneous panel of American subjects.

Their results showed that, indeed, among conservatives, "opposition to equality" was a powerful predictor in the categorization of mixed-race faces as Black rather than White. However, this was not the case for "group-based dominance."

"These results suggest that conservatives may be categorizing mixed-race faces as Black to justify racial divisions that are part of the historical legacy of the social system in the United States," the researchers wrote.

They added that while the findings in this experiment were statistically significant for its White subjects, the sample size for non-White subjects was too small to draw any meaningful conclusions.