{"id":516,"date":"2016-12-07T13:19:37","date_gmt":"2016-12-07T18:19:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/l-stires.com\/thinking-slowly\/?p=516"},"modified":"2017-07-14T17:55:54","modified_gmt":"2017-07-14T21:55:54","slug":"what-does-a-welfare-recipient-look-like","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/l-stires.com\/thinking-slowly\/what-does-a-welfare-recipient-look-like\/","title":{"rendered":"What Does a Welfare Recipient Look Like?"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>Economic inequality in the United States<\/a> is at record levels. In surveys, Americans say they would prefer<\/a> a more equal distribution of wealth. However, the majority consistently votes against<\/a> public assistance programs that redistribute wealth. Political scientist Martin Gilens, in his 1999 book Why Americans Hate Welfare<\/i><\/a>, attributes this primarily to racial prejudice. Gilens examined the photographs that accompanied stories about poverty in the news magazines Time, Newsweek<\/i> and U. S. News.<\/i> 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,<\/a> 32% of welfare recipients were Black, 32% were White and 30% were Hispanic.\n

Gilens also did an experiment<\/a> in which a \u201cwelfare mother\u201d 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\u2019 research is that White Americans\u2019 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\u2014that is, that the average American\u2019s mental image of a welfare recipient is a Black person.<\/p>\n

A research team headed by Jazmin Brown-Iannuzzi<\/a> of the University of Kentucky sought to measure their participants\u2019 mental representations of a typical welfare recipient using an unusual technique. I\u2019m 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 \u201cbase face,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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