Racial socioeconomic gaps are widened in periods of economic recession. Besides social and institutional factors, black people also struggle with many psychological factors. The literature reports racial-biased complex behaviors and high-level processes that are influenced by economic scarcity. A previous study found a bias at the perceptual level: an experimental manipulation of scarcity (a subliminal priming paradigm) lowered the black-white race categorization threshold. Here we present a conceptual replication in a higher ecological setup. In our main analysis we compared the categorization threshold of participants that received the Brazilian government’s emergency economic aid in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic ( n = 136) and participants that did not receive the economic aid ( n = 135) in an online psychophysical task that presented faces in a black-white race continuum . Additionally, we analyzed the economic impact of COVID-19 on household income, and in cases of family unemployment. Our results do not support the claim that perception of race is influenced by economic scarcity. Interestingly, we found that when people differ greatly in terms of racial prejudice, they encode visual information related to race differently. People with higher scores on a prejudice scale needed more phenotypic traits of the black race to categorize a face as black. We discuss the results in terms of differences in method and sample.

Os grupos do Programa de Educação Tutorial (PET) realizam anualmente encontros nacionais e regionais sediados em diferentes cidades todos os anos. Durante o ano de 2020 todo o mundo parou e precisou se adaptar às novas condições em decorrência da pandemia causada pelo SARS-COV-2, conhecido como coronavírus. Os grupos PET,  compreendendo a necessidade de manutenção dos espaços deliberativos e de diálogos frente a um momento de crise da saúde e em decorrência da instabilidade do momento, decidiu-se pela realização dos eventos de maneira remota como forma de manter a comunidade petiana ativa e unida em prol do Programa de Educação Tutorial. Este trabalho evidencia aspectos da organização de um evento regional, de maneira virtual, apresentando as dificuldades e os pontos fortes desta modalidade de atividade.