People unwittingly become more racially aware and less generous towards those of a different skin tone when they feel financially squeezed, according to a study showing how racism thrives in an economic recession. A series of psychological tests has revealed the deep-seated prejudices of white people towards black faces when they experience financial pressures resulting from an economic downturn similar to the global crash of 2008. Racial disparities in household wealth are known to increase significantly between white Americans and African Americans during a recession and this has been largely explained by institutional racism but the latest findings suggest a subconscious form of racial prejudice.
When times are hard, people are more likely to judge mixed-race individuals as “black”. Previous research in the US has shown that the more prototypically black a person is judged to be, the more likely they are to be socially excluded, shot when unarmed in police training tests, or sentenced to death after a guilty verdict.
“When the economy declines, racial minorities are hit the hardest. Although existing explanations for this effect focus on institutional causes, recent psychological findings suggest that scarcity may also alter perceptions of race in ways that exacerbate discrimination,” according to Amy Krosch and David Amodio of New York University. “We tested the hypothesis that economic resource scarcity causes decision makers to perceive African Americans as ‘blacker’ and that this visual distortion elicits disparities in the allocation of resources,” they write in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“It is well known that socioeconomic disparities between white Americans and racial minorities expand dramatically under conditions of economic scarcity,” said Professor Amodio, the study’s senior author. “Our findings indicate that scarcity changes the way that the people visually perceive another person’s race, and that this perceptual distortion can contribute to disparities,” he said.
“People typically assume that what they see is an accurate representation of the world, so if their initial perceptions of race are actually distorted by economic factors, people may not even realise the potential for bias,” Amy Krosch said
The study involved a series of tests. The first investigated how non-black volunteers judged the race of an individual based on a series of 110 morphed faces that ranged from 100 per cent white to 100 per cent black.
Those who believed that white and black people were competing with one another for resources – judged from questionnaires – were more likely to categorise mixed-race faces as “black” compared with people who did not see competition between the races.
The same test was run when the volunteers were exposed to “subliminal” messages in the form of key words flashed on a screen for a few milliseconds. When words indicating a heightened sense of resource scarcity were used, the volunteers showed a lower threshold for identifying mixed-races faces as black, the researchers found.
A further test showed that the non-black volunteers were more likely to judge a face as “black” when they felt they had been short-changed from a hypothetical endowment. The researchers point out that the blacker the perceived skin tone of an individual, the more discrimination they face in predominately white society.
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When times are hard, people are more likely to judge mixed-race individuals as “black”. Previous research in the US has shown that the more prototypically black a person is judged to be, the more likely they are to be socially excluded, shot when unarmed in police training tests, or sentenced to death after a guilty verdict.
“When the economy declines, racial minorities are hit the hardest. Although existing explanations for this effect focus on institutional causes, recent psychological findings suggest that scarcity may also alter perceptions of race in ways that exacerbate discrimination,” according to Amy Krosch and David Amodio of New York University. “We tested the hypothesis that economic resource scarcity causes decision makers to perceive African Americans as ‘blacker’ and that this visual distortion elicits disparities in the allocation of resources,” they write in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“It is well known that socioeconomic disparities between white Americans and racial minorities expand dramatically under conditions of economic scarcity,” said Professor Amodio, the study’s senior author. “Our findings indicate that scarcity changes the way that the people visually perceive another person’s race, and that this perceptual distortion can contribute to disparities,” he said.
“People typically assume that what they see is an accurate representation of the world, so if their initial perceptions of race are actually distorted by economic factors, people may not even realise the potential for bias,” Amy Krosch said
The study involved a series of tests. The first investigated how non-black volunteers judged the race of an individual based on a series of 110 morphed faces that ranged from 100 per cent white to 100 per cent black.
Those who believed that white and black people were competing with one another for resources – judged from questionnaires – were more likely to categorise mixed-race faces as “black” compared with people who did not see competition between the races.
The same test was run when the volunteers were exposed to “subliminal” messages in the form of key words flashed on a screen for a few milliseconds. When words indicating a heightened sense of resource scarcity were used, the volunteers showed a lower threshold for identifying mixed-races faces as black, the researchers found.
A further test showed that the non-black volunteers were more likely to judge a face as “black” when they felt they had been short-changed from a hypothetical endowment. The researchers point out that the blacker the perceived skin tone of an individual, the more discrimination they face in predominately white society.
From here
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