Intersectional invisibility: The moderating impact of perceived incongruence between stigmatized identities

Abstract

There is evidence that people with multiple stigmatized identities sometimes experience psychological invisibility—perceivers show difficulty remembering information about these targets (e.g., their faces, spoken statements). In three experiments (total N = 397; within-subject design), we examined how North African gay men’s invisibility is impacted by the perceived incongruence between their minority identities. Across all studies, participants made more memory errors for North African gay men’s statements when they personally believed that being both gay and North African is highly incongruent. In addition, evidence for the salience of intersectional categories as an underlying psychological mechanism was found (Study 3). The present work adds to the literature by showing that invisibility depends on the characteristics of the targets but also on perceivers’ beliefs about targets’ identity incongruence.