Does This Recession Make Me Look Black?

Newswise — White persons viewing pictures of bi-racial people are more likely to categorize the faces as black when given cues signaling economic recession. They are more likely to label the faces as white when shown cues of economic prosperity.

That’s what three Texas Christian University researchers found when they conducted two experiments with a total of 152 white participants.

“We predicted that willingness to include racially ambiguous individuals as part of their racial in-group would be lower in participants primed with scarcity cues than in participants primed with abundance cues,” says Sarah E. Hill, assistant professor of psychology at TCU.

That’s what happened in both experiments. The results are explained in a forthcoming issue of the journal, Psychological Science. The article: “Does This Recession Make Me Look Black? The Effect of Resource Scarcity on the Categorization of Biracial Faces,” is written by Christopher D. Rodeheffer, a graduate student, and Sarah E. Hill, and Charles G. Lord, professors of psychology.

In the first study, about half of 71 white undergraduate students viewed a slide show of captioned pictures of economic hardship. The second group watched a slide show of captioned pictures suggesting economic prosperity.

Participants then viewed photos of 20 bi-racial faces. They were asked: “If you had to choose, would it be more accurate to describe this bi-racial individual as black or white?”

“As predicted, participants in the scarcity condition categorized more faces as belonging to a racial out-group,” reports Dr. Hill.

A second study was held with 81 white undergraduates. This time students were asked to complete analogy problems suggesting three conditions: resource scarcity, resource abundance and a neutral “control” group suggesting neither. Again, participants primed with cues to scarcity categorized more bi-racial faces as Black.

“Out-group prejudice continues to be a widespread feature of human social life,” Dr. Hill says. “One theory is that people will be more discriminating about who belongs to their in-group when their access to a resource is constrained.”

It’s not a new assumption. It was Publilius Syrus in the first-century BC who said, “Prosperity makes friends; adversity tries them.”

“We wanted to examine whether perceptions of resource scarcity decreases the inclusiveness of racial in-groups. These experiments suggest that may be the case.”