Dr.

Keith Payne is a professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of North

Carolina, Chapel Hill. This essay is excerpted from his book, The Broken Ladder: How
Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die.

AS YOU READ: Do we make assumptions about people based on socio-economic status?

What assumptions do we make about economic policies designed to help the poorer people
in our society?

Decades of studies have found a strong correlation° between dislike of black people and
opposition to social welfare° policies aimed at helping the poor. For example, political
scientist Martin Gilens found that most Americans believe inequality is too high, and seven
in ten think that government spending to help the poor should be increased. And yet, by the
same margin, Americans think welfare spending should be cut. “Welfare” simply refers to
the suite of race-neutral government programs aimed at helping the poor, so these results
don’t make much sense on their surface.
correlation:
Relationship between two things.
welfare:
A set of government programs providing financial support to those in need.

But it turn out that when Americans talk about “the poor,” they mean something veq
different from when they talk about “welfare recipients.” The best predictor of wanting to
slash funding for welfare recipients is racial prejudice. People who believe that black
Americans are lazy and undeserving are the most likely to oppose welfare spending.

Racial bias is not the only reason that people could be against welfare spending, of course.
Economists have pointed out that middle- and upper-class citizens have a rational° interest
in opposing welfare spending. From their perspective, cutting taxes on the affluent° and
cutting benefits to the poor is simply the self-interested thing to do. People might similarly
oppose welfare spending on principled ideological grounds. They might value hard work and
self-reliance, and as such regard welfare as a dependency trap, a position often taken by
politicians and political elites. But Gilens’s studies find no evidence that these are major
motivations for ordinary citizens. Statistically speaking, if you want to predict who
is predisposed° against welfare, you can mostly ignore their economic principles. What you
really need to know is their prejudices.
rational:
Based on reason.
affluent:
Wealthy.
predisposed:
Inclined to something.
While it may not be surprising that the average person views welfare in racially tinged terms,
the truth is that welfare recipients are about evenly divided among white, black, and Hispanic
recipients. But when Gilens analyzed depictions of welfare recipients in television and
newsmagazines since the 1960s, he found a clear racial bias: When welfare recipients were
depicted as the “deserving poor,” they were mostly white, but when they were portrayed as
lazy and dishonest, they were overwhelmingly black.

This cultural messaging linking welfare to lazy people in general and lazy black people in
particular makes it difficult to discuss welfare without racial overtones. This association fuels
debates about “dog-whistle politics,” in which many people hear coded messages about race
in what are ostensibly° straightforward policy statements. Ronald Reagan’s famous
comments about “welfare queens” driving Cadillacs outraged Democrats, though Reagan
denied his remark had anything to do with race. His case was not helped when his adviser
Lee Atwater described coded racial messages as a central component of the Republican
“Southern strategy” in a 1981 interview: “By 1968 you can’t say ‘ni**er’ — that hurts you.
Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting
so abstract now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about
are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites.
And subconsciously maybe that’s part of it.”
ostensibly:
Apparently.

More recently, House Speaker Paul Ryan was accused of dog-whistling when he explained
poverty as a “tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just
generations of men not even thinking about working ....” He, too, later claimed that his
comment had nothing to do with race.

We can’t know for certain what the intent of these leaders was. Did they mean to stir up
racial divisions in the minds of white voters while maintaining plausible deniability? Or did
they genuinely seek to be racially neutral while members of the opposing party interpreted
their comments cynically? The fact is, if you support Reagan and Ryan, you will be inclined
to give them the benefit of the doubt. But if you distrust them, you are more likely to view
them as making none-too-subtle racially tinged comments.

The interesting observation from a psychological point of view is that the intention of the
speaker ultimately doesn’t matter. What does matter is how the audience interprets his
words. The notion of racially coded messaging — intentional or not — assumes a
psychological leap on the part of listeners. It assumes that when politicians talk about
policies, voters naturally connect them to race. My collaborators Jazmin Brown-Iannuzzi,
Erin Cooley, Ron Dotsch, and I recently tested whether people really make this
psychological leap. We wanted to determine whether, when citizens are asked about welfare
recipients, their mind’s eye viewed them as black people.
To find that out, we needed a way to visualize our subjects’ mental representations. We
began by creating a composite photo consisting of selected facial features from a black man,
a black woman, a white man, and a white woman. To this androgynous biracial face, we
added random visual noise, like static on a TV screen. We repeated this exercise hundreds of
times until we had a large set of faces where each looked slightly different and slightly
blurry. We then showed research participants pairs from this group of photos and asked them
to select which one looked more like a welfare recipient. By morphing together all of the
images that had been judged to be the “welfare recipient” and then morphing those that had
been chosen as the “non-welfare recipient,” we then created two new composite photos.

The images that emerged captured subjects’ images of what a welfare recipient looked like.
When we showed pairs of unlabeled images to a new set of participants, they described the
welfare recipient image as a black man and the image of the non-recipient as a white man.
They judged the welfare recipient as looking lazy, irresponsible, hostile, and unintelligent.
Chillingly, they also regarded the welfare recipient as being less human. You can see clearly
defined eyes in the image of the non-recipient, but the eyes of the welfare recipient
are hollow.°
hollow:
Empty.
Next, we tested whether these mental images actually cause differences in support for welfare
benefits. We showed the images of the typical welfare recipient and the non-recipient, without
identifying them, to another group of subjects and asked whether they would be in favor of
providing food stamps and cash assistance to each. When they imagined giving benefits to the
non-recipient, they were generally supportive. But when they pictured giving benefits to the
welfare recipient, they were opposed. The very qualities that people envision° about welfare
recipients are the qualities that lead them to oppose giving them benefits.

envision:
Visualize.
Economic inequality creates a status-based us-and-them mentality that heightens race bias. And
the close connections between race, poverty, and deservingness in the minds of citizens are a
major obstacle to reducing economic inequality. Many people simply don’t feel very motivated
to support fighting poverty when they imagine that minorities will be the beneficiaries.

Acknowledging the existence of racial bias makes many citizens feel hopeless, because it seems
so hard to change. Implicit bias seems especially difficult, because it resides not just in the minds
of individuals but in the nebulous° current of people and ideas that make up the culture around
us. Recent research, however, raises some grounds for optimism. Millions of people have taken
an implicit bias test at projectimplicit.com, a website where you can test yourself for biases
related to race, gender, age, and other social groups. Psychologist Dominic Packer investigated
which American states showed the highest and lowest levels of race bias, and what elements
distinguished them.

nebulous:
Unclear.
One of the most important factors was income inequality. States with lower inequality had less
implicit bias, even after accounting for average income and regional differences between the
North and South. Low-inequality states like Oregon, Washington, and Vermont had much less
bias than high-inequality Louisiana, New Jersey, or Pennsylvania. Although it may be difficult to
change people’s hearts and minds, economic policies can certainly reduce income inequality.