Throughout the history of the United States, the black-white multiracial people have been defined legally as black, a culture that was perpetuated widely by the Whites and was accepted by the Blacks. According to psychological research, this bias in categorization is referred to as hypodescent. In this rule, the biracials are judged to belong more to the parent group with a lower status. The research has revealed that the categorization persists until today especially among the white social perceivers. As research suggests, even though this categorization bias was started by the Whites for reasons of social stratification, it might have been used by the Blacks too, though for different purposes (Ho et al., 2017). However, there is no clear knowledge concerning if the hypodescent exists for both the white, black and biracial groups. That is, further research has to be conducted to determine the social underpinnings behind hypodescent. This paper, therefore, explains a research that was conducted to determine the relationship between social dominance orientation (SDO) and the whites’ categorization of whites, blacks, and black-white biracials.
SDO does predict intergroup phenomena starting from the support of aggression against the groups of low status and opposition of the policies that can bring social equality. The people high in social dominance orientation endorse various ideologies like engaging in various behaviors which are intended to keep the existing social stratification systems. With the possibility for the hypodescent rule to maintain the existing social boundaries, it is theorized that social dominance orientation can predict the application of hypodescent in the categorization of biracials (Ho etal., 2013).
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However, it is not in every situation or historical circumstance that requires active group boundary policing. Sociologists argue that there was a time when black-white biracials got tolerated in American history and they were given a special in between social status (Aboud et al., 2003). The rule of hypodescent only came when slavery institutions were threatened. This is when the dominant whites started enforcing the rule. Empirical research has revealed that SDO may also be activated by circumstances where hierarchy is threated and perceived as not stable by the dominant group (Ho et al., 2015). More important, the studies indicated that SDO was not associated with the intergroup system or bias beliefs without intergroup threat. To understand this further, research has to be conducted to determine whether there is a relationship between SDO and the categorization bias of blacks, whites and biracial groups. We, therefore, hypothesize that there is a negative relationship between SDO and the whites’ categorization of blacks and black-white biracials, no correlation between the SDO and the whites’ categorization of whites and, no correlation between the SDO and the whites’ categorization of blacks.
Methods
Participants
The participants were made of 72 white undergraduate students. This included 40 and 32 females. Of the 72 students, 30 were freshmen, 25 were sophomores and 17 were juniors. Basically, the age range was between 18 and 25 years with the mean age being 22 years. There was no compensation for these students for having participated in the research. The participation was voluntary.
Materials
Data was mainly collected using questionnaires. All the 72 participants were asked to take a 10 minutes one-page questionnaire where they provide their responses concerning their demographics and how they viewed individuals from the white race, black race, and black-white biracials. In the questions of the questionnaires, there were major variables including SDO and group membership.
Procedure
White students from different universities in the United States were randomly selected to take part in the study. There were twelve groups of researchers and therefore the collection of data involved twelve universities whereby each group targeted twelve students as participants of the research. Permission was obtained from the officials of these universities prior to the research. The participants also signed a consent form after which they were asked to fill the questionnaires.
Results
There were various tests that were conducted to come up with the research findings. For SDO measure and group membership, Pearson correlation significance test was done. The Pearson product membership test yields the following results. For the white target group, r (25) = .0.1, p>. 0.5. For the black target group, r (25) = -.11, p> .05. For the black-white biracial target group, r (24) =-.54, p<.05.
Discussion
For the white target group, it was hypothesized that there was no correlation between group membership and SDO. This was supported by the Pearson product-moment membership test r (25) = .0.1, p>. 0.5. It was hypothesized that for the black target group, there is no collection between group membership and SDO. This was supported by Pearson’s correlation test of r (25) = -.11, p> .05. For the black-white biracial target group, it was hypothesized that there was a negative correlation between group membership and SDO. The test also supported the hypothesis r (24) =-.54, p<.05.
From the findings, we can conclude that there is no relationship between group membership and SDO for the black target group. Also, there is no relationship between group membership and SDO for the white target group. There is however a negative relationship between group membership and SDO for the black-white biracial target group.
It, therefore, appears that the individuals in high SDO engage in behaviors of boundary maintenance under the situations people engage in boundary maintenance behaviors that are costly (Ho et al., 2017). In other words, when there is a situation that puts the existing social order is under threat. This research has indicated that perceiving threats as realistic may interact with social dominance orientation to further influence the application of hypodescent just as the findings of previous studies (Aboud et al., 2003).
This could mean that SDO alone does not influence hypodescent. Hypodescent may be influenced by social orientation dominance only when it is coupled with other factors such as availability of intergroup threat ( Krosch et al., 2013) . Further research should, therefore, be conducted to include other variables like intergroup hierarchy threat to determine which specific factors when combined with SDO cause hypodescent (Ho et al., 2015).
References
Aboud, F., Mendelson, M., & Purdy, K. (2003). Cross-race peer relations and friendship quality. International Journal of Behavioral Development , 27 (2), 165-173.
Ho, A. K., Sidanius, J., Cuddy, A. J., & Banaji, M. R. (2013). Status boundary enforcement and the categorization of black–white biracials. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology , 49 (5), 940-943.
Ho, A. K., Kteily, N. S., & Chen, J. M. (2017). “You’re one of us”: Black Americans’ use of hypodescent and its association with egalitarianism. Journal of personality and social psychology , 113 (5), 753.
Ho, A. K., Sidanius, J., Kteily, N., Sheehy-Skeffington, J., Pratto, F., Henkel, K., ... & Stewart, A. (2015). The nature of social dominance orientation: Introducing the Social Dominance Orientation-7 Scale. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 109 (6), 1003-28.
Krosch, A. R., Berntsen, L., Amodio, D. M., Jost, J. T., & Van Bavel, J. J. (2013). On the ideology of hypodescent: Political conservatism predicts categorization of racially ambiguous faces as Black. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology , 49 (6), 1196-1203.
