Economic scarcity alters the perception of race

Abstract

Significance Racial disparities on socioeconomic indices expand dramatically during economic recession. Although prior explanations for this phenomenon have focused on institutional causes, our research reveals that perceived scarcity influences people’s visual representations of race in a way that may promote discrimination. Across four studies, scarce conditions led perceivers to view Black people as “darker” and “more stereotypically Black” in appearance, relative to control conditions, and this shift in perception under scarcity was sufficient to elicit reduced resource allocations to African American recipients. These findings introduce a “motivated perception” account for the proliferation of racial and ethnic discrimination during times of economic duress.

Visualising mental representations: A primer on noise-based reverse correlation in social psychology

“…Below we review each briefly. Researchers have used reverse correlation tasks to identify features diagnostic for Black and White faces (Fiset, Wagar, Tanaka, Gosselin, & Bub, 2007;Krosch & Amodio, 2014), Moroccan faces (Dotsch et al, 2008, Chinese faces (Dotsch et al, 2008), European and Australian (Imhoff, Dotsch, Bianchi, Banse, & Wigboldus, 2011), as depicted in Figure 4. Various studies have focused on visualising the gender of faces (see Figure 5; Mangini & Biederman, 2004;Nestor & Tarr, 2008;Dotsch et al, 2011) and of bodies (Johnson, Iida, & Tassinary, 2012;Lick, Carpinella, & Preciado, 2013).…”

Perceiving the World Through Group-Colored Glasses: A Perceptual Model of Intergroup Relations

“…For instance, preferential visual attention to the eyes of own-race (vs. other-race) individuals predicted own-race bias in face recognition such that people were better able to recognize people from their own race and more willing to interact with own-race over other-race members (Kawakami et al, 2014). Moreover, biased perception predicted disparities in resource allocation-specifically the perception of African Americans as "Blacker"-and was associated with less willingness to grant resources to this racial group (Krosch & Amodio, 2014). In a separate context, perceived physical proximity led highly identified group members (i.e., Yankees fans) to express more discriminatory attitudes toward members of a threatening outgroup (i.e., the Red Sox) and a preference for sitting farther away from them at a sporting event (Xiao, Wohl, & Van Bavel, 2016).…”

“…Some recent work has demonstrated that perception of "Blackness" in African Americans was influenced by economic resource scarcity (Krosch & Amodio, 2014). These researchers presented people with pairs of degraded face images and had them choose the one that looked more "Black."…”

“…Aggregating all responses resulted in a face representation of a Black person from people in the scarce condition and a representation from those in the control condition. Ratings from a separate sample of people showed that the representation from the scarce resource condition was more stereotypical of Blacks than the control condition (see top panel in Figure 5; Krosch & Amodio, 2014). Status (white collar vs. blue collar) has also been shown to influence perception of race from faces, such that lower status increased the likelihood of perceiving a racially ambiguous face as Black (vs. White; see Figure 6; Freeman, Penner, Saperstein, Scheutz, & Ambady, 2011).…”

“…Then participants determined the numerical style-the group membership-of two presented blurry images (Ratner, Dotsch, Wigboldus, van Knippenberg, & Amodio, 2014). Using the same reverse correlation technique described earlier (Krosch & Amodio, 2014), these researchers generated the face representations of the minimal ingroup face and the minimal outgroup face (see bottom pattern in Figure 5). A separate study using the same technique resulted in an aggregate image of a "trustworthy person," and it bore a striking resemblance to the "ingroup face" (see bottom panel in Figure 5).…”