Economic inequality in the United States is at record levels. In surveys, Americans say they would prefer a more equal distribution of wealth. However, the majority consistently votes against public assistance programs that redistribute wealth. Political scientist Martin Gilens, in his 1999 book Why Americans Hate Welfare, attributes this primarily to racial prejudice. Gilens examined the photographs that accompanied stories about poverty in the news magazines Time, Newsweek and U. S. News. African-Americans accounted for 62% of the poor people shown in the photos. On the ABC, CBS and NBC nightly news programs, 65% of poor people shown in reports on poverty were Black. In reality, as of 2010, 32% of welfare recipients were Black, 32% were White and 30% were Hispanic.
Gilens also did an experiment in which a “welfare mother” was identified as either White or Black. Participants who read about a Black welfare recipient were more opposed to welfare than those reading of a White recipient. The implication of Gilens’ research is that White Americans’ disdain for welfare is explained in part by racial prejudice. Americans hate welfare because they overestimate the percentage of recipients who are African-Americans. However, there is a missing link in this analysis. Gilens implies, but does not show, that Americans are influenced by these misleading media reports—that is, that the average American’s mental image of a welfare recipient is a Black person.
A research team headed by Jazmin Brown-Iannuzzi of the University of Kentucky sought to measure their participants’ mental representations of a typical welfare recipient using an unusual technique. I’m not sure I completely understand it without seeing a demonstration, but the image generation phase of their study goes something like this: First, they constructed a computer-generated “base face,” a composite of a Black man, a Black Woman, a White man and a White woman. Then, on each of 400 trials, the computer introduced noise which altered the base image in two opposite directions. The participants were asked to choose which of these two altered faces most resembled a welfare recipient and which one resembled a non-welfare recipient. (Race was never mentioned.) The computer then generated a composite image of a typical welfare recipient and a typical non-welfare recipient, based on all the responses of all the participants.
This was done twice, with 118 college students participating in Study 1 and 238 internet volunteers in Study 2. The composite faces from the two studies are similar and are shown below. Although the composite faces of the welfare recipients look like African-Americans, I presume this was less apparent to the participants as they made their 400 decisions.
During the second phase of these two studies, 90 different participants were shown one of the composite faces and were asked to rate the person on a number of different dimensions. No mention of welfare was made to these participants. The raters judged the welfare recipient composites as more likely to be African-American (rather than White) than the non-welfare recipient composites. The welfare recipients were also rated more negatively on 11 different traits, including lazier, more incompetent, more hostile, less likeable and less human(!). These studies fill in the missing link in Gilens’ research. The average person’s mental image of a typical welfare recipient is of an African-American.
Finally, Brown-Iannuzzi and her colleagues did a third study, an experiment in which 229 internet volunteers were shown one of the composite images—either a welfare recipient or a non-welfare recipient—and asked a number of questions. The critical items were whether they would support giving this person food stamps and cash assistance. The other questions repeated some of the ratings used in the previous studies. Here are the results. This study replicates the Gilens experiment mentioned in the second paragraph.
In summary, the first two studies showed that when asked to imagine a typical welfare recipient, people generate a mental image of an African-American, while their mental image of a non-welfare recipient is that of a White person. The third study demonstrated that when other people are shown these mental images, they were less supportive of giving welfare to the composite typical welfare recipients than the composite non-welfare recipients.
Finally, the authors did a mediational analysis to see which variables mediated between the composite images and the decision to support or not support giving welfare to that person. The data were consistent with the following causal chain (see below): The image leads first to an inference that the person is either Black or White. This, in turn, leads to a judgment of how deserving the person is. (Black people are less deserving.) Finally, the judgment of deservingness leads the decision of whether to support giving welfare to the person.
We are going through a period of extreme racialization of politics. Americans’ racial attitudes influence their opinions about other political issues that may or may not be related to race. In some cases, survey participants’ racial attitudes determine their attitude toward a policy merely because they believe President Obama does or does not support the policy. Not only do racial attitudes appear to have been the strongest predictor of support for Donald Trump, they mattered more in electing Trump than Obama.
Nowhere is racialization more evident than in attitudes toward financial relief for the poor. People support income redistribution in principle, but they overestimate the percentage of poor people who are Black. As a result, their racial prejudice discourages them from supporting income redistribution policies.
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