The Relationship Between Mental Representations of Welfare Recipients and Attitudes Toward Welfare

Abstract

Scholars have argued that opposition to welfare is, in part, driven by stereotypes of African Americans. This argument assumes that when individuals think about welfare, they spontaneously think about Black recipients. We investigated people's mental representations of welfare recipients. In Studies 1 and 2, we used a perceptual task to visually estimate participants' mental representations of welfare recipients. Compared with the average non-welfare-recipient image, the average welfare-recipient image was perceived (by a separate sample) as more African American and more representative of stereotypes associated with welfare recipients and African Americans. In Study 3, participants were asked to determine whether they supported giving welfare benefits to the people pictured in the average welfare-recipient and non-welfare-recipient images generated in Study 2. Participants were less supportive of giving welfare benefits to the person shown in the welfare-recipient image than to the person shown in the non-welfare-recipient image. The results suggest that mental images of welfare recipients may bias attitudes toward welfare policies.

Racial Assumptions Color the Mental Representation of Social Class

“…These findings expand on the earlier research of Brown-Iannuzzi et al (2017) in some noteworthy ways. They show that racialized representations of the poor can be found even in the absence of racial dog-whistle terms such as “welfare recipients,” they confirm that wealthy people are imagined to look White, and they show that the racial content of mental images of the poor and the middle class vary depending on level of economic prejudice.…”

“…Most relevant to the hypothesis that social class is racialized is a recent set of experiments by Brown-Iannuzzi et al (2017). These studies showed that perceivers’ mental representations of welfare recipients were significantly Blacker than their representations of non-welfare recipients.…”

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).…”

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

“…Researchers have used reverse correlation to visualise diagnostic features for various professions (Hehman, Flake, & Freeman, 2015;Imhoff, Woelki, Hanke, & Dotsch, 2013), such as athletes, bankers, business men, doctors, drug dealers, financial advisors, nursery teachers, nurses, power-lifters and rappers, as well as sexual orientation Hinzman & Maddox, 2017;Tskhay & Rule, 2015), political orientation (liberal vs. conservative; Tskhay & Rule, 2015) and various castes and religions in India (Dunham, Srinivasan, Dotsch, & Barner, 2014). Finally, Brown-Iannuzzi, Dotsch, Cooley and Payne (2017) visualised faces of welfare recipients (Brown-Iannuzzi, Dotsch, Cooley, & Payne, 2017).…”