Economic pressure affects our perception of race, says an NYU study.(Dean Rohrer/NewsArt)
To find out if economic stress affects how people view race, two New York University researchers conducted a series of experiments.
Their ultimate findings? That African-Americans appear "blacker" to whites in times of economic scarcity.
The study participants fell into non-black ethnic or racial groups. They were first asked to complete a questionnaire that covered a number of topics. Included were a few questions about their perception of economic competition between the races.
Next, they were asked to view 110 computer images of faces that had been computer-generated in 11 gradations from predominately white to predominately black. The study subjects were supposed to label them "black" or "white."
They found the subjects whose questionnaires showed a greater sense of competition between the races had a lower threshold for identifying mixed-race images as black.
For the next part of the experiment, the researchers concocted a scenario in which the study subjects would feel some economic strain. Specifically, they flashed a series of words for a scant 20 milliseconds before the subjects viewed the computer-morphed faces.
Some of the words connoted economic competition: "scarce," "resource," "sparse," "limited." Some were negative words unrelated to scarcity, such as "brutal" or "odious." Finally, they also saw words that were random: "fluffy" and "antique" among them.
The result? When a facial image was preceded by one of the scarcity words, respondents were more likely to characterize the image as black than as white. In other words, a multi-racial face they may have characterized as "white" in the first go-around would appear "black" to them in these circumstances.
The words associated with scarcity elicited a greater perception of "blackness" in the subsequent images than did the words that were broadly negative, but unrelated to scarcity.
But those were just their subjects' thoughts. To find out if it would result in action, the researchers came up with a third experiment. The white study subjects were told they were going to play an "allocation" game in which they would allocate half of $10 to their partner.
One group was told they would each get only $10 even though $100 was available. The second group also got $10, but was told that was the total available. So the first group was left with the impression they'd gotten the short end of the stick - that others may have received more.
While all the subjects waited for their allocation partner to appear on the computer, they were told to kill time by rating 400 images as either black or white. Based on their answers, the computer generated a "composite" face that represented the average perception of a black face for the two allocation groups..
Guess what? When they showed those faces to a new set of white subjects, they deemed the face created by the people in the "short-end-of-the-stick" category to be "significantly" darker and more black.
It would seem they showed that people's racial fears kick in when under economic pressure. But to test that finding in a non-laboratory setting, they enlisted the help of random adults encountered in a city park. The researchers told the people they were studying whether it was possible to judge how deserving someone was based solely on their appearance.
Next, they were showed the two computer composites generated in the previous experiment, and told the park participants to determine how they would divide $15 between the two.
The face generated by the study subjects who felt short-changed — the face that ended up being blacker — ended up getting "significantly" less money in the park experiment.
"People typically assume that what they see is an accurate representation of the world, so if their initial perceptions of race are actually distorted by economic factors, people may not even realize the potential for bias," said Amy Krosch, a doctoral student with NYU's Department of Psychology.
The findings appear in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.