Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

Scholars have argued that opposition to welfare is, in part, driven by stereotypes of African Americans. This argument assumes that when individuals think about welfare, they spontaneously think about Black recipients. We investigated people’s mental representations of welfare recipients. In Studies 1 and 2, we used a perceptual task to visually estimate participants’ mental representations of welfare recipients. Compared with the average non-welfare-recipient image, the average welfare-recipient image was perceived (by a separate sample) as more African American and more representative of stereotypes associated with welfare recipients and African Americans. In Study 3, participants were asked to determine whether they supported giving welfare benefits to the people pictured in the average welfare-recipient and non-welfare-recipient images generated in Study 2. Participants were less supportive of giving welfare benefits to the person shown in the welfare-recipient image than to the person shown in the non-welfare-recipient image. The results suggest that mental images of welfare recipients may bias attitudes toward welfare policies.

Keywords

stereotyped attitudes socioeconomic status social cognition open data open materials

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Ashok

Kuziemko

Washington

(2015). Support for redistribution in an age of rising inequality: New stylized facts and some tentative explanations (Brookings Papers on Economic Activity). Retrieved from https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/2015a_ashok.pdf

Bartels

L. M.

(2005). Homer gets a tax cut: Inequality and public policy in the American mind. Perspectives on Politics, 3, 15–31.

Buhrmester

Kwang

Gosling

S. D.

(2011). Amazon’s Mechanical Turk: A new source of inexpensive, yet high-quality, data? Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6, 3–5.

Craig

M. A.

Richeson

J. A.

(2014). On the precipice of a “majority-minority” America: Perceived status threat from the racial demographic shift affects White Americans’ political ideology. Psychological Science, 25, 1189–1197.

Dotsch

(2015). rcicr: Reverse-correlation image-classification toolbox [R package Version 0.3.0]. Retrieved from https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=rcicr

Dotsch

Todorov

(2012). Reverse correlating social face perception. Social Psychological & Personality Science, 3, 562–571.

Dotsch

Wigboldus

D. H. J.

Langner

van Knippenberg

(2008). Ethnic out-group faces are biased in the prejudiced mind. Psychological Science, 19, 978–980.

Edsall

T. B.

Edsall

M. D.

(1991). Chain reaction: The impact of race, rights, and taxes on American politics. New York, NY: W. W. Norton.

Faul

Erdfelder

Buchner

Lang

A.-G.

(2009). Statistical power analyses using G*Power 3.1: Tests for correlation and regression analyses. Behavior Research Methods, 41, 1149–1160.

10.

Fox

(2004). The changing color of welfare? How Whites’ attitudes toward Latinos influence support for welfare. American Journal of Sociology, 110, 580–625.

11.

Gilens

(1995). Racial attitudes and opposition to welfare. Journal of Politics, 57, 994–1014.

12.

Gilens

(1996). “Race coding” and White opposition to welfare. American Political Science Review, 90, 593–604.

13.

Gilens

(1999). Why Americans hate welfare: Race, media, and the politics of antipoverty policy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

14.

Goff

P. A.

Eberhardt

J. L.

Williams

Jackson

M. C.

(2008). Not yet human: Implicit knowledge, historical dehumanization, and contemporary consequences. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94, 292–306.

15.

Gray

H. M.

Gray

Wegner

D. M.

(2007). Dimensions of mind perception. Science, 315, 619.

16.

Greenwald

A. G.

McGhee

D. E.

Schwartz

J. L. K.

(1998). Measuring individual differences in implicit cognition: The implicit association test. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 1464–1480.

17.

Hamilton

D. L.

(Ed.). (2015). Cognitive processes in stereotyping and intergroup behavior. New York, NY: Psychology Press.

18.

Harell

Soroka

Iyengar

(in press). Race, prejudice and attitudes toward redistribution: A comparative experimental approach. European Journal of Political Research.

19.

Hilton

J. L.

von Hippel

(1996). Stereotypes. Annual Review of Psychology, 47, 237–271.

20.

Imhoff

Dotsch

(2013). Do we look like me or like us? Visual projection as self- or ingroup-projection. Social Cognition, 31, 806–816.

21.

Imhoff

Woelki

Hanke

Dotsch

(2013). Warmth and competence in your face! Visual encoding of stereotype content. Frontiers in Psychology, 4, Article 386. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00386

22.

Krosch

A. R.

Amodio

D. M.

(2014). Economic scarcity alters the perception of race. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 111, 9079–9084.

23.

Kuziemko

Norton

M. I.

Saez

Stantcheva

(2015). How elastic are preferences for redistribution? Evidence from randomized survey experiments. American Economic Review, 105, 1478–1508.

24.

Lee

Roemer

J. R.

(2006). Racism and redistribution in the United States: A solution to the problem of American exceptionalism. Journal of Public Economics, 90, 1027–1052.

25.

Luttmer

E. P.

(2001). Group loyalty and the taste redistribution. Journal of Political Economy, 109, 500–528.

26.

Mangini

M. C.

Biederman

(2004). Making the ineffable explicit: Estimating the information employed for face classification. Cognitive Science, 28, 209–226.

27.

Meltzer

A. H.

Richard

S. F.

(1981). A rational theory of the size of government. Journal of Political Economy, 89, 914–927.

28.

Montoya

A. K.

Hayes

A. F.

(2016). Two-condition within-participant statistical mediation analysis: A path-analytic framework. Psychological Methods. Advance online publication. doi:10.1037/met0000086

29.

Norton

M. I.

Ariely

(2011). Building a better America—one wealth quintile at a time. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6, 9–12.

30.

Oppenheimer

D. M.

Meyvis

Davidenko

(2009). Instructional manipulation checks: Detecting satisficing to increase statistical power. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45, 867–872.

31.

Payne

B. K.

Cheng

C. M.

Govorun

Stewart

(2005). An inkblot for attitudes: Affect misattribution as implicit measurement. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 89, 277–293.

32.

Peffley

Hurwitz

Sniderman

P. M.

(1997). Racial stereotypes and Whites’ political views of Blacks in the context of welfare and crime. American Journal of Political Science, 41, 30–60.

33.

Saez

Zucman

(2014). Wealth inequality in the United States since 1913: Evidence from capitalized income tax data (NBER Working Paper Series). Retrieved from http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/SaezZucman2014.pdf

34.

Sears

D. O.

Cirin

(1985). Tax revolt: Something for nothing in California. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

35.

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (2012). Characteristics and financial circumstances of TANF recipients, fiscal year 2010. Retrieved from http://www.acf.hhs.gov/ofa/resource/character/fy2010/fy2010-chap10-ys-final

36.

Wetts

Willer

(2015). Anxiety and austerity: A group position account of White Americans’ opposition to welfare. Manuscript in preparation.

37.

Wilkinson

Pickett

(2009). The spirit level: Why greater equality makes societies stronger. New York, NY: Bloomsbury.

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB

0.59 MB

0.28 MB

The Relationship Between Mental Representations of Welfare Recipients and Attitudes Toward Welfare

Abstract

Keywords

Get full access to this article

References

Supplementary Material