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.
Highlights
Recent psychological research on social categorization has emphasized the intersecting and overlapping nature of our representations of social groups (Cole, 2009; Ridgeway and KricheliKatz, 2013; Kang and Bodenhausen, 2015)
We examine the hypothesis that conceptions of social class are racialized, with low economic status being associated with Black Americans and high economic status being associated with White Americans
Among relatively more class-prejudiced participants, the representation of a poor person was Blacker than the representations generated for the middle income or rich composites
Summary
Recent psychological research on social categorization has emphasized the intersecting and overlapping nature of our representations of social groups (Cole, 2009; Ridgeway and KricheliKatz, 2013; Kang and Bodenhausen, 2015). Given that White individuals constitute the majority group in the United States and make up the greatest percentage of both poor and rich individuals (DeNavas-Walt and Proctor, 2015), one reasonable possibility is that the racial content of all social class categories, including the poor, is White by default This view accords with the assertion of intersectionality theorists that when perceivers think about one subordinated social category (e.g., the poor), they assume default features on other dimensions (e.g., White, male, heterosexual, etc.; Purdie-Vaughns and Eibach, 2008). That is, when people think of the category “poor person” they do not generally activate the concept “Black.” Overall, this suggests that mental representations of the poor may not incorporate any inherent notion of Blackness
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