The Misperception of Racial Economic Inequality

Abstract

Racial economic inequality is a foundational feature of the United States, yet many Americans appear oblivious to it. In the present work we consider the psychology underlying this collective willful ignorance. Drawing on prior research and new evidence from a nationally representative sample of adults ( N = 1,008), we offer compelling evidence that Americans vastly underestimate racial economic inequality, especially the racial wealth gap. In particular, respondents thought that the Black–White wealth gap was smaller, by around 40 percentage points in 1963 and around 80 percentage points in 2016, than its actual size. We then consider the motivational, cognitive, and structural factors that are likely to contribute to these misperceptions and suggest directions for future research to test these ideas. Importantly, we highlight the implications of our collective ignorance of racial economic inequality and the challenge of creating greater accuracy in perceptions of these racial economic disparities, as well as outline the steps policymakers might take to create messages on this topic that effectively promote equity-enhancing policies. We close with an appeal to psychological science to at least consider, if not center, the racial patterning of these profound economic gaps.

Framing, Context, and the Misperception of Black-White Wealth Inequality

“…Specifically, this pattern is consistent with the possibility that being asked to consider inequality in the past and in the present heightens the salience of narratives of societal racial progress; namely, that racial equality is linearly increasing over the passage of time (Hur & Ruttan, 2019;Kraus et al, 2019; Richeson, 2020)-a belief not activated when only considering the present state of society. That narratives of racial progress inform perceptions of racial inequality is something that we and others have theorized (Bell, 1987;DeBell, 2017;Eibach & Ehrlinger, 2006;Kraus et al, 2019;Seamster & Ray, 2018). The present investigation also furthers the aims of related research that considers how highlighting the salience of racial inequality and racism across time can activate beliefs in societal progress (see Onyeador et al, 2020).…”

“…As depicted in Figure 1, our past research (both published and unpublished data) has reliably found that when compared to the actual amount of Black-White wealth equality estimated based on the SCF or SIPP, respondents significantly overestimate Black-White wealth equality (Kraus et al, 2019(Kraus et al, , 2017. Nevertheless, there is also evidence in our past work suggesting that the context in which we solicit estimates of Black-White economic equality may contribute to the degree that people overestimate it.…”

“…One outcome of these efforts was a set of recommendations regarding "best practices" for asking lay audiences about the economic structure of society, including 1) limiting the number of group comparisons, 2) avoiding reliance on math and in particular, percentages, and 3) basing accuracy judgements only on high quality benchmark economic data (Davidai, 2018;Eriksson & Simpson, 2012, 2013Swan et al, 2017). Drawing on these recommendations, our prior work (Kraus, Onyeador, Daumeyer, Rucker, & Richeson, 2019;Kraus, Rucker, & Richeson, 2017;Kuo, Kraus, & Richeson, 2020) solicited estimates of racial economic equality with variations on the basic question, "If the average White family has $100 of some resource (e.g., wealth, income, wages), how much does the average Black family have?" Using a 0-200 rating scale, this question method relies on a single comparison between two groups, limited mathematical calculation, and represents the resource values as whole numbers rather than percentages.…”

“…Estimates of current Black wealth when White wealth is $100 across seven studies. Samples 1 (Kraus et al, 2019) and 2 (Kraus et al, 2017) are published elsewhere whereas the remaining samples represent currently unpublished data from prior studies. The remaining estimates are from unpublished work from MTurk (Sample 3), our lab at Yale's School of Management (Sample 4), or collected in three different classrooms of professional students (Samples 5 through 7).…”

“…Black-White wealth equality are motivated (e.g., Kraus et al, 2019), in this variation we provided a monetary incentive to reduce overestimates, and therefore, increase accuracy (Hess et al, 2016). Participants in this condition were told that one respondent who answers with the correct answer in the shortest amount of time would receive a $100 US bonus for participation in the experiment 4 .…”