That’s what new research suggests:
David Amodio, a psychology professor at New York University and Amy Krosch, a graduate student, performed a series of experiments that showed that their predominantly white study subjects tended to view biracial people as “more black” when they were primed with economic scarcity, and that the subjects were stingier toward darker-complexioned people overall. …
Of course, past studies have also shown that scarcity and resource competition fosters distrust between groups. The ingroup/outgroup cognitive bias theory holds that we prefer people who resemble us. But this research suggests that financial strain can cause the very definition of the “out” group to change, as well, by nudging us to view people of other races as even more dissimilar to ourselves.
Maya Rhodan elaborates:
[P]articipants were asked to identify whether select images depicted black people or white people, while researchers manipulated select economic conditions. In one study, participants were first asked to express agreement or disagreement with “zero-sum” beliefs like “When blacks make economic gains, whites lose out economically,” and then asked to identify the race of the people featured in 110 images – people whose skin color varied greatly. The study’s results showed that those with stronger “zero sum” beliefs were more likely to consider the images of mixed-face subjects as “blacker” than they actually were.
[Krosch and Amodio] found similar results when participants were asked to identify whether someone was black or white after being shown words related to scarcity like “limited” and “resource.” The remaining studies threw economics into the mix – asking subjects how they would divide $15 between people represented by two images – and not only were images of darker-skinned people deemed “blacker” than they actually were relative to the average skin color, they were allocated fewer funds.
Jesse Singal adds:
The standard caveats apply: This was a lab setting; in real life people make these sorts of decisions differently; and so on. But given previous research on race, scarcity, and bias, it’s a useful data point, and a useful reminder that scarcity has a lot of negative effects on human behavior – some of them a bit surprising.
The Dish 