The Fatigue of Being Mis-Seen: What a New Study on Multiracial Faces Teaches Us About Belonging
New research reveals a profound disconnect between what our eyes see and what our social brains then perceive, and why the gap matters for our mixed-race clients.
If you work clinically with clients who identify as mixed-race or multiracial, you have likely heard variations of a specific story…
the clients who are constantly being asked ‘but where are you actually form?’.
the clients who do not fully feel they relate to the culture they live in nor the culture associated with their ethnic background.
the clients that feel they do not fully belong to either ethnicity that that they are part of.
I write from a place of both intrigue and personal experience. I am a quarter-Seychellois, if humans can even be divided up into neat categories like that. I am constantly asked (when in the UK) where I am actually from or what my ethnic heritage is. When I lived in Texas for university people just assumed I was South American and looked like they saw an alien when my British accent came out.
I’m not blaming people for asking or assuming things at all, because I have always assumed good, or at least neutral, intent. Part of that is being white enough to experience white privilege (I had to re-read that 5x to make sure it made sense), meaning I have generally been safe to assume it’s never with bad intent.
However, over time it does lead to a sense of dysmorphia about your own identity - whereby your inner world does not match outer perception. Equally, I am sure my brain does the very errors in perception of other people I’m about to describe in this article. In addition, I do not expect people to identify me correctly - that seems an impossible task. So I’m not even sure what I’m looking for here other than to describe how confusing it can be. The brain is a weird place.
Anyway, back to the research.
In clinical spaces, we often find identity comes up in nearly all difficulties.
But a fascinating 2025 study1 published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by Debbie Ma and her colleagues sheds a completely new light on this experience for multiracial identity.
It exposes a disconnect between what our eyes actually see and what our social brains then perceive.
The Data: Why We Are Bad at Seeing Mixed-Race People
The backdrop of this research is a striking demographic shift: between 2010 and 2020, the number of people identifying as multiracial in the U.S. skyrocketed by 276%2. The category ‘multiracial’ is also the fastest growing demographic in the UK3.
Yet, previous social psychology research shows that when everyday people are asked to spontaneously describe or categorise a mixed-race face, they only label them as multiracial between 2% and 8% of the time4.
Instead, our brains generally (the research is still developing) take two major cognitive shortcuts:
The sociocultural phenomenon known as ‘hypodescent’: Categorising a mixed-race person entirely by their least socially dominant heritage (e.g., categorising a Black-White individual as Black in a predominantly White society, categorising an Asian-White individual as White in a predominantly Asian society).
The “Emergent Race” Phenomenon: Categorising a mixed-race person as an entirely different group that doesn’t match their actual ancestry (e.g., labeling Asian-White individuals as Latinx or Middle Eastern).
Of note, as used in this study, these terms have no assumed or proven intent, but simply are studied as cognitive phenomena5. The research is still developing significantly and there are many questions to be answered as to the psychological processes behind them. I have both been on the receiving end of ‘emergent race’ and categorised someone wrongly in that way too.
But, Ma and her team wanted to find out why this happens. Is it a “hardware problem”, meaning our eyes and brain literally struggle to see the physical differences in a mixed-race face? Or is it a “software problem”, meaning a cognitive process is over-riding what we’re seeing?
Can We Distinguish Faces?
To test this, in the first three experiments they showed participants pairs of standardised faces (including Asian-White, Black-White, monoracial, and Latinx faces) and simply asked them to rate how physically similar they were. Crucially, the researchers never mentioned race, ancestry, or categories. They just let people look stripped of other information.
The findings were clear: our brain has no issue distinguishing. In experiments 1-3 conducted, the researchers found that multiracial faces are perceptually discriminable from non-multiracial faces.
The low rate of accurately seeing people as multiracial in daily life isn’t then an optical illusion or a lack of visual data. It is a something happening in our processing outside of stripped back environments.
The moment our brain moves from raw visual perception to conscious social labeling, our cognitive processes, prejudice, motivation, and/or social cognition, appear to completely erase what our eyes just saw.
Why This Matters for the Therapy Room
When we bring this back to clinical work, this study offers an incredibly powerful understanding of the chronic, low-level vigilance and identity-relevant performance anxiety that multiracial clients may often experience.
Here is how I’ve been thinking about this in regards to the clinical room:
1. Validating the Weariness of “Category Friction”
When a client constantly has their identity mislabeled, it isn’t just annoying; it is a violation of their core sense of self. Ma’s research suggests that when a client is mis-categorised, it happens because the observer is cognitively forcing the client’s unique features into a pre-existing, rigid societal “box” to make their own thinking easier.
2. Belonging Nowhere
Many mixed-race clients struggle with a sense of belonging no-where. Importantly, if we look at the experience of someone Asian-White, the research suggests that a White person would perceive that person to be Asian, whilst other research suggests that an Asian person will categorise Asian–White multiracial faces as White6. That leaves Asian-White people experiencing misclassification from both communities - a feeling often conveyed by many Asian-White7 people who experience this as belonging nowhere.
3. Shifting from “Maladaptive” to “Understanding Threat”
If a multiracial client presents with social fear or difficulties around being seen, traditional CBT might jump straight to treating the cognitive distortions around performance. But this research reminds us to look at the baseline threat landscape. If a client has spent a lifetime navigating a world where their face causes brief cognitive friction or misinterpretation in others, it’s quite understandable if their brain has learned that being looked at is inherently unpredictable.
What do you think?
If you work with multiracial clients, does this land with your experience in the therapy room?
I’ve also written about this as a reflection for working with clients, but what about multiracial therapists? How does this impact perception by clients of you? How do you find your own experience?
I’d love to hear your clinical reflections and personal thoughts in the comments below!
Want to share this post with a therapist or researcher who would find it useful? Share it here! :)
Ma, D. S., Kantner, J., Elias, E. M., Diaz, S., & Pauker, K. (2025). Are multiracial faces perceptually distinct?Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 128(3), 536–566. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000413
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/08/improved-race-ethnicity-measures-reveal-united-states-population-much-more-multiracial.html
https://www.migrationmuseum.org/census-reveals-new-chapter-in-story-of-mixed-race-britain/
https://sites.duke.edu/dukeidlab/files/2018/05/MultiplicityMalleability.pdf
Nicolas, G., Skinner, A. L., & Dickter, C. L. (2019). Other than the sum: Hispanic and Middle Eastern categorizations of Black–White mixed-race faces. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 10(4), 532–541. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550618769591
Hypodescent as a concept originated from other research on oppression, and of course there, bad intent is present. However the usage of the term in this research is in regards to cognitive shortcuts.
Chen, J. M., Moons, W. G., Gaither, S. E., Hamilton, D. L., & Sherman, J. W. (2014). Motivation to control prejudice predicts categorization of multiracials. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 40(5), 590–603. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167213520457
Please note I am using Asian-White as defined in the research, which is based in the USA, and appears to be talking about what appears to be Southeast and East Asian ethnicity, but I could not find clarification.