Psychological mechanisms through which economic scarcity propels racial prejudice

当美国经济遭遇重大挫折时，其影响并不局限于金融领域，也不是所有社会阶层都平均受到不利影响。例如，在最近的经济衰退中，美国黑人家庭财富的减少幅度远远大于白人。虽然人们经常用现有的结构性不平等来解释衰退期间出现的差距扩大，但艾米·r·克罗什（Amy R. Krosch）与研究员戴维·m·阿莫迪奥（David M. Amodio）合作的最新研究发现，差距存在心理基础。他们的研究表明，对经济稀缺性的感知会影响视觉感知过程，例如，少数民族的人在外表上被认为更刻板，反过来，也更不值得获得资源。这些发现表明，经济事件可能威胁到群体间的关系，增加歧视，使特定群体面临严重风险。然而，这些宏观经济因素影响种族观念的心理机制尚不清楚。了解这种机制对于制定减少经济匮乏对偏见和歧视的影响的方法至关重要。目前的项目侧重于关键的社会认知机制，通过这种机制，对经济稀缺的感知会导致对少数种族群体个人的偏见视觉感知。在一系列的八个实验中，研究者验证了这样一个假设，即感知到的稀缺不仅会导致刻板印象，还会导致非人化过程：从一张脸中推断出独特的人类特征和情感，并将其神经编码为人脸的倾向降低。实验测试了这些过程是否直接使感知者对少数种族个体的视觉表征产生偏见，而这种视觉表征反过来又传播了行为歧视。本研究建立在经济因素如何影响群体间关系的经典理论和新理论的基础上，并创新地使用行为、神经科学和心理物理学方法来研究种族的视觉处理。这项研究旨在获得经济因素如何导致持续存在的差异的关键知识，并为如何减轻这些影响提供一些方向。

When the U.S. economy experiences significant setbacks, its impact is not limited to the financial realm, nor are the detrimental effects evenly shared across all segments of society. For example, in the recent recession, Black Americans had a decrease in household wealth that was much greater than that of Whites. Although widening disparities that occur during recessions are frequently explained in terms of existing structural inequalities, recent findings by Amy R. Krosch, in collaboration with the investigator David M. Amodio, suggests a psychological basis for disparities. Their work indicates that perception of economic scarcity affects visual perception processes such that those from minority racial groups are perceived as more stereotypical in appearance, and in turn, as less deserving of resources. Such findings suggest that economic events can threaten intergroup relations and increase discrimination, putting particular groups at acute risk. However, the psychological mechanisms by which these macroeconomic factors affect racial perceptions is not understood. Understanding such mechanisms is essential for developing ways to reduce the effects of economic scarcity on prejudice and discrimination.The current project focuses on key sociocognitive mechanisms through which perceptions of economic scarcity cause biased visual perceptions of individuals from racial minority groups. In a series of eight experiments, the investigator tests the hypothesis that perceived scarcity induces not only stereotyping, but dehumanization processes as well: reduced tendency to infer uniquely human-like traits and emotions from a face and to neurally encode it as a human face. Experiments test whether these processes directly bias perceivers' visual representations of individuals from racial minority groups, which, in turn, propagates behavioral discrimination. This research builds on both classic and novel theories of how economic factors influence intergroup relations, and it makes innovative use of behavioral, neuroscientific, and psychophysical methodologies to examine the visual processing of race. This research aims to gain crucial knowledge of how economic factors contribute to persisting disparities and provide some direction for how these effects may be mitigated.