Racial Assumptions Color the Mental Representation of Social Class

Abstract

We investigated the racial content of perceivers’ mental images of different socioeconomic categories. We selected participants who were either high or low in prejudice toward the poor. These participants saw 400 pairs of visually noisy face images. Depending on condition, participants chose the face that looked like a poor person, a middle income person, or a rich person. We averaged the faces selected to create composite images of each social class. A second group of participants rated the stereotypical Blackness of these images. They also rated the face images on a variety of psychological traits. Participants high in economic prejudice produced strongly class-differentiated mental images. They imagined the poor to be Blacker than middle income and wealthy people. They also imagined them to have less positive psychological characteristics. Participants low in economic prejudice also possessed images of the wealthy that were relatively White, but they represented poor and middle class people in a less racially differentiated way. We discuss implications for understanding the intersections of race and class in social perception.

External motivation to avoid prejudice alters neural responses to targets varying in race and status

“…Another possibility consistent with previously observed categorical associations between race and status ( Weeks and Lupfer, 2004 ; Penner and Saperstein, 2008 ; Freeman et al , 2011 ; Lei and Bodenhausen, 2017 ) is that race and status may interact during person evaluation ( Correll et al , 2011 ; Moore-Berg et al , 2017 ). Due to high-EMS perceivers’ anxiety about appearing prejudiced ( Amodio et al , 2006 ) and tendency to focus on non-racial attributes ( Norton et al , 2006 ; Apfelbaum et al , 2008 ), NAcc and VMPFC responses may evince a simultaneously enhanced evaluation of high-SES Black targets and a devaluation of high-SES White targets ( Bergsieker et al , 2010 ; Swencionis and Fiske, 2016 )—with the reverse pattern in amygdala activation.…”

Americans misperceive racial economic equality

“…For instance, how do these findings relate to recent research demonstrating that most Americans' mental image of a poor person is of a Black person (44,45)? One possibility is that people generate different exemplars when estimating these economic inequality gaps than when thinking about poor people in general, lowincome people who benefit from government-funded food and/or housing programs, or even specific subtypes of poor people (e.g., homeless individuals).…”

An intersectional approach to understanding how race and social class affect intergroup processes

“…It could be that categorization speed is influenced by underlying mental representations. For instance, mental representations of low social class people and welfare recipients tend to look African American, whereas mental representations of high social class people and non‐welfare recipients tend to look White (e.g., Brown‐Iannuzzi, Dotsch, Cooley, & Payne, ; Fox, ; Lei & Bodenhausen, ). Together these findings highlight how the activation of both focal and nonfocal social categories influence the categorization, visualization, and mental representations of individuals in stereotype‐consistent ways.…”