Thread by @AmyKrosch

🌟🌟🌟Thrilled to share a new lab paper🌟🌟🌟
“The threat of a majority-minority U.S. alters white Americans’ perception of race” in press at JESP
static1.squarespace.com/static/574317a…

Others nicely document effects of a coming “majority-minority” US on white peoples’ feelings of threat and increasing anti-minority discrimination (e.g., @mocraig4, @jaricheson)…we find this demographic shift might also alter WHO is considered a minority in the first place.

In a first correlational study, white perception that minority status gains = white status losses was related to a lower threshold for seeing faces as Latino

Experimentally manipulating threat of an impending majority-minority U.S. led white perceivers to lower their threshold for seeing computer-morphed mixed-race faces as Latino, Black, and "not white"

This threat also increased the likelihood of categorizing real racially ambiguous faces as "not white" and was strongest for maximally ambiguous faces

Collapsing across studies (n = 1653), white status threat mediated the effect of a shifting demographic on race perception

Among non-white participants, the demographic threat manipulation also increased the perception that white status would be threatened, but did not change race perception...presumably because non-white Pp aren't motivated to resolve this threat by shifting who is "white"

(though obviously "non-white" participants are not a monolith and future work is needed to examine factors like group status in the racial hierarchy, contribution to changing U.S. demographics, white ancestry or not, and other experience-based or motivational
factors)

Together, these findings provide strong convergent evidence of an effect of demographic change on race perception through increased white status threat such that threatened white people lean on hypodescendant perception to bolster their status

Supplemental studies showed that 1) this effect was not driven by changing baseline demographic beliefs and 2) that we can reverse the effect when white perceivers think seeing *more* mixed-race faces as white will bolster their status

On a personal note, I'm especially proud bc this paper started as an *honors thesis* with then-undergrad Suzy Park (now at Columbia law school), then-grad student Jessie Walker (now a prof at OSU), and then-lab manager Ari Lisner (now writing for the NYT!) - a true DREAM TEAM!

Just combed my emails - we officially started the project in Aug of 2017! and the ideas had been percolating long before

Finally getting this work published has taken on outsized significance in my mind because it was rejected from another journal right as covid was turning the world upside down (3/3/21), when caregiving a toddler had me convinced I would never write another word

the very next day after that rejection (!) I got word of a similar paper that had just been published:

https://twitter.com/asr_journal/status/1235231710129905665?s=20

and truly though that was it for this paper

We plugged away - incorporated the very helpful original reviewer and editor feedback, revised and resubmitted, got (rightfully) rejected again :(

Spent another year adding studies and tightening things up. Received exceptionally constructive editorial and reviewer feedback at JESP and after some additional data and tweaking...here we are!

Feeling grateful for co-authors, @KroschLab, editors/reviewers who engaged so thoughtfully in the work (during a global pandemic!) and truly improved the paper. For @GuntherSarah and @MarcGunther for the gift of time and cabin friends for the gift of peaceful writing space ❤️