Pragmatic Insights into Assessing Race Concepts across Cultures

Race concepts, which are socially determined rules to classify individuals into racial groups, vary across cultures and are consequential for people’s life chances. Yet little psychological research has examined optimal methods to capture cross-cultural differences in race concepts. In three cross-cultural studies conducted in the United States (where race is determined primarily by ancestry) and Brazil (where race is influenced by appearance, such as skin tone), total N = 853, the present research compared different methodological approaches to assess people’s race concepts, including open-ended assessments (i.e., “How would you determine someone’s race?”) and close-ended assessments that (a) isolated ancestry and skin tone by listing these pieces of information separately, or (b) contrasted these two traits, in which privileging either type of information would lead to different racial classifications. Results indicated that open-ended assessments led to the least amount of cross-cultural variation. Stronger cross-cultural differences were found for the close-ended assessments that isolated ancestry and skin tone, but the most robust differences were found for assessments that contrasted these traits. These findings shed light on pragmatic factors that should be considered when assessing social concepts cross-culturally. More broadly, this research advances understanding of how race operates across different cultural contexts and highlights the need to expand U.S.-centric psychological theories of race to account for cross-cultural variation.