Liz Quinn-Jensen presents poster at Cognitive Development Society conference

Liz presented a poster on “White Adult and Children’s Perceptions of Contextual Racial Presentation.” She was interested in how children and adults judge biracial people who engage in identity flexibility, and whether their conceptualizations of what it means to be biracial impacts these judgments. Results showed that both adults and children judge a biracial person as less trustworthy and are less likely to rate their behavior as acceptable when they engage in identity flexibility compared to maintaining a fixed identity. Also, adults who conceptualize a biracial identity as context-dependent judge a biracial person who engages in identity flexibility less negatively (but we don’t find strong evidence for this pattern with children).