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How might people’s political ideology affect their perception of race?
Previous research by Amy Krosch, assistant professor of psychology in the College of Arts and Sciences, has shown that white people who identify themselves as political conservatives tend to have a lower threshold for seeing mixed-race Black and white faces as Black.
More often than liberals, Krosch found, white political conservatives show a form of social discrimination termed “hypodescent” – categorizing multiracial individuals as members of the “socially subordinate” racial group.
In new research published Feb. 22 in Philosophical Transactions of Royal Society B, Krosch used neuroimaging to show that this effect seems to be driven by white conservatives’ greater sensitivity to the ambiguity of mixed-race faces rather than a sensitivity to the Blackness of faces; this sensitivity showed up in a neural region often associated with affective reactions.