Through the lens of race: Accounting for majority-minority relations in cross-race categorization and individuation

Abstract

Race is a fundamental organizing principle along which many societies differentiate their members, as is prominently the case for Black and White individuals in the United States (US). This dominance is also mirrored in individuals' spontaneous tendency to see a group of individuals as exemplars of racial categories. Traditional models of intergroup cognition suggest that people better remember in-group members (the cross-race-effect, CRE) and more quickly and accurately categorize out-group members (the other-race categorization advantage, ORCA) due to differences in perceptual salience and functional relevance. However, these findings were mainly based on White populations and may therefore not fully capture the perceptions of racialized minorities, such as Black individuals in the US. Given their markedly different experiences with systemic inequality, minority group members may individuate majority group members to the same extent as, or even more than, their in-group. The present research examined cross-race categorization and individuation among Black and White US Americans (N = 511) using the “Who Said What?” task (Taylor et al., 1978) combined with multinomial processing tree modeling (Klauer & Wegener, 1998). White participants showed stronger out-group categorization and in-group individuation, aligning with the traditional intergroup perspective. In contrast, Black participants displayed attenuated or reversed patterns, favoring in-group categorization and out-group individuation. While interracial contact and perceived racial identity threat had no effects, racial identification amplified racial categorization in White participants and reinforced the individuation of Black faces among Black participants. These findings underscore the importance of considering racialized majority-minority dynamics in models of intergroup cognition.