Shifting Stereotypes of Welfare Recipients Can Reverse Racial Biases in Support for Wealth Redistribution

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (8) ◽  
pp. 1065-1074 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin Cooley ◽  
Jazmin L. Brown-Iannuzzi ◽  
Caroline Boudreau
Keyword(s):  
Shift Work ◽  
Work Ethic ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
Welfare Recipients ◽  
Government Assistance ◽  
Financial Independence ◽  
Welfare Policies ◽  
Negative Work ◽  
Racial Biases ◽  
Wealth Redistribution

When people imagine welfare recipients, research indicates that they often imagine lazy, Black Americans who are perpetually dependent on government assistance. In the present work, we investigate the last assumption—perpetual dependence. We hypothesize that providing information about recipients’ ability to obtain financial independence may reduce racial biases in support for welfare policies. In Study 1, when given no information about recipients’ ability to obtain independence, White participants reported less support for the program and a greater desire to monitor recipient spending, when the majority of recipients were Black (vs. White). However, learning that most recipients gained independence (i.e., they obtained jobs and exited the program) eliminated or reversed these racial biases—an effect associated with reduced negative work ethic stereotypes of welfare recipients (Study 2). We conclude that perceived independence of welfare recipients may shift work ethic stereotypes and increase support for welfare policies, regardless of recipient race.

scholarly journals Who gets to vote? Racialized mental images of legitimate and illegitimate voters

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jazmin Lati Brown-Iannuzzi ◽  
Keith Payne ◽  
Erin Cooley ◽  
Will Cipolli
Keyword(s):  
Black Americans ◽  
Black Study ◽  
Mental Images ◽  
Racial Biases ◽  
Mind's Eye ◽  
Voter Id ◽  
Black Voters ◽  
Survey Approach

When people support voter ID laws, who do they imagine they are keeping out of the voting booth? In four studies using online samples of US residents, we found evidence that support for voter ID laws was associated with racialized mental images of voters. Participants who supported voter ID laws imagined those who should vote as looking more White than those who should not vote (Study 1). Both supporters and opponents of voter ID laws imagined those who lack valid ID as appearing Black (Study 2), suggesting both sides of the debate understand these laws disproportionately affect Black voters. Support for voter ID laws was associated with imagining illegal voters that were more representative of Black Americans (Study 3). We conceptually replicated these findings using a survey approach (Study 4). These findings suggest that racial biases in the mind’s eye are associated with support for voter ID laws.

scholarly journals Systemic racism: individuals and interactions, institutions and society

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mahzarin R. Banaji ◽  
Susan T. Fiske ◽  
Douglas S. Massey
Keyword(s):  
Social Groups ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Interracial Interactions ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
Racial Isolation ◽  
Racial Biases ◽  
Domains Of Life ◽  
Interpersonal Patterns ◽  
The Mind

AbstractSystemic racism is a scientifically tractable phenomenon, urgent for cognitive scientists to address. This tutorial reviews the built-in systems that undermine life opportunities and outcomes by racial category, with a focus on challenges to Black Americans. From American colonial history, explicit practices and policies reinforced disadvantage across all domains of life, beginning with slavery, and continuing with vastly subordinated status. Racially segregated housing creates racial isolation, with disproportionate costs to Black Americans’ opportunities, networks, education, wealth, health, and legal treatment. These institutional and societal systems build-in individual bias and racialized interactions, resulting in systemic racism. Unconscious inferences, empirically established from perceptions onward, demonstrate non-Black Americans’ inbuilt associations: pairing Black Americans with negative valences, criminal stereotypes, and low status, including animal rather than human. Implicit racial biases (improving only slightly over time) imbed within non-Black individuals’ systems of racialized beliefs, judgments, and affect that predict racialized behavior. Interracial interactions likewise convey disrespect and distrust. These systematic individual and interpersonal patterns continue partly due to non-Black people’s inexperience with Black Americans and reliance on societal caricatures. Despite systemic challenges, Black Americans are more diverse now than ever, due to resilience (many succeeding against the odds), immigration (producing varied backgrounds), and intermarriage (increasing the multiracial proportion of the population). Intergroup contact can foreground Black diversity, resisting systemic racism, but White advantages persist in all economic, political, and social domains. Cognitive science has an opportunity: to include in its study of the mind the distortions of reality about individual humans and their social groups.

The Role of Monetary and Non-Monetary Job Quality Components in Determining Welfare Exit

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-103
Author(s):  
NETTA ACHDUT ◽  
HAYA STIER
Keyword(s):  
Economic Condition ◽  
Single Mother ◽  
Job Quality ◽  
Welfare Recipients ◽  
Panel Survey ◽  
Policy Changes ◽  
Welfare Policies ◽  
Quality Aspects

AbstractContemporary welfare policies in many Western countries limit means tested public assistance for the long-term unemployed and spur rapid movement into the labor market. Studies on welfare use determinants that traced these policy changes focused on individuals’ characteristics, economic condition, and various policy components. Little attention was paid to welfare recipients’ job quality or its role in determining welfare exit. The present study examined the contribution of various job quality aspects, beyond wages, to welfare exit among welfare recipients in Israel. We considered the use of workers’ own skills and occupation, existence of standard employment contract (versus temporary), irregular work schedule, and application of mandatory and non-mandatory non-wage compensation attributes. The data derive from a national panel survey of 2,800 single-mother recipients of welfare in 2003. The results indicate the importance of these job components for welfare exit, above and beyond wages. Implications for policy are discussed.

scholarly journals Depicted welfare-recipient stereotypes in Norway and Denmark: a photo-elicitation study

2016 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sofie Dencker-Larsen ◽  
Kjetil G. Lundberg
Keyword(s):  
Work Ethic ◽  
Welfare Recipient ◽  
Interview Data ◽  
Individual Responsibility ◽  
Welfare Recipients ◽  
Photo Elicitation ◽  
Elicitation Study ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
Methodological Aspects

Welfare recipients are continuously subjected to media debates and governmental campaigns drawing on images and symbols encouraging improved work ethic and individual responsibility. Only few studies, however, have analysed how welfare recipients as ‘othered’ citizens react to these often stereotypical symbols and images targeting them. In this study we have investigated how welfare recipients in Norway and Denmark, and caseworkers in Denmark, understand and account for images which, through the use of stereotypes, directly or indirectly may question welfare recipients’ work ethic and deservedness. Analysing photo-elicitation interview data, we have uncovered a variety of reactions characterized by ‘problematization’. The interviewees problematize the image and depicted stereotypes, which they link both with motif and symbols and with surrounding public debates on the work ethic and deservedness of welfare recipients. Furthermore, as photo-elicitation is a rarely used tool in welfare research, we address methodological aspects of using photo-elicitation in a study of ‘othered’ welfare recipients.

Investigating the Interplay Between Race, Work Ethic Stereotypes, and Attitudes Toward Welfare Recipients and Policies

2021 ◽  
pp. 194855062098305
Author(s):  
Jazmin L. Brown-Iannuzzi ◽  
Erin Cooley ◽  
Christopher K. Marshburn ◽  
Stephanie E. McKee ◽  
Ryan F. Lei
Keyword(s):  
Work Ethic ◽  
Welfare Recipients ◽  
Black Study ◽  
Information Control ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Welfare Programs ◽  
Demographic Composition ◽  
Welfare Benefits ◽  
People’S Attitudes

The current research investigates the role of racialized work ethic stereotypes on attitudes toward welfare. We hypothesized that work ethic stereotypes shape both people’s attitudes toward welfare and their perceptions of who benefits from these policies. Consistent with hypotheses, when the demographic composition of welfare recipients was majority Black (vs. White), participants thought recipients were lazier and were less positive to welfare programs and policies (Study 1). Describing welfare recipients as hardworking (vs. no information control) mitigated this effect, even when the demographic composition of welfare recipients was majority Black (Study 2). Finally, we investigated whether work ethic stereotypes shape both attitudes toward welfare and spontaneous mental images of recipients. Images generated when participants were asked to envision hardworking (vs. lazy) recipients were rated by a separate sample as more representative of White Americans and garnered more support for providing welfare benefits (Study 3).

scholarly journals Depicted welfare-recipient stereotypes in Norway and Denmark: a photo-elicitation study

2016 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sofie Dencker-Larsen ◽  
Kjetil G. Lundberg
Keyword(s):  
Work Ethic ◽  
Welfare Recipient ◽  
Interview Data ◽  
Individual Responsibility ◽  
Welfare Recipients ◽  
Photo Elicitation ◽  
Elicitation Study ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
Methodological Aspects

Welfare recipients are continuously subjected to media debates and governmental campaigns drawing on images and symbols encouraging improved work ethic and individual responsibility. Only few studies, however, have analysed how welfare recipients as ‘othered’ citizens react to these often stereotypical symbols and images targeting them. In this study we have investigated how welfare recipients in Norway and Denmark, and caseworkers in Denmark, understand and account for images which, through the use of stereotypes, directly or indirectly may question welfare recipients’ work ethic and deservedness. Analysing photo-elicitation interview data, we have uncovered a variety of reactions characterized by ‘problematization’. The interviewees problematize the image and depicted stereotypes, which they link both with motif and symbols and with surrounding public debates on the work ethic and deservedness of welfare recipients. Furthermore, as photo-elicitation is a rarely used tool in welfare research, we address methodological aspects of using photo-elicitation in a study of ‘othered’ welfare recipients.

Welfare, Race, and the American Imagination

Sociology ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joan Maya Mazelis ◽  
Stephen Pimpare
Keyword(s):  
Welfare Reform ◽  
Welfare Recipients ◽  
Poor People ◽  
Negative Consequences ◽  
Welfare Policies ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Before And After ◽  
History Of ◽  
Policies And Programs ◽  
The 1960S

This entry includes a variety of sources on American beliefs about welfare and race. There is a much larger literature on poverty and race not included here, including the important topics of residential segregation, employment inequality, mass incarceration, and housing discrimination. Welfare here is defined narrowly, mostly to include Mothers’ Pensions/Aid to Families with Dependent Children that welfare reform changed to Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. Perceptions of Blackness in particular shape welfare policy and opinion, so the focus on racism herein is on anti-Black racism, essential to making sense of the development of US social welfare policies and programs and how they function. Ideas of work, of the “proper” roles for women, and of opportunity all shape opinion and policy. Notions of the “Welfare Queen” still dominate American thinking. The first section focuses on the history of poverty and welfare and the second specifically focuses on the role of racism in welfare. The third section focuses on the use of the term ‘underclass’ and its racist undertones. In the fourth section the sources are the main texts by key authors who assert negative consequences for society of having welfare and who advocate reducing or eliminating benefits. These first four sections focus on welfare’s early days, including the earliest relevant history of the colonial period and the Revolutionary War but through the New Deal of the 1930s and the War on Poverty of the 1960s. In the fifth section the sources detail issues of public opinion and discourse regarding race, welfare, and the “American Dream.” The sixth section examines the Perspectives and Discourse among Poor People and Welfare Recipients, while the seventh section includes sources on the Experiences of Welfare Recipients before welfare reform. The eighth section is the first section in the article to engage with the topic of the 1996 welfare reform, the law which overhauled welfare and spelled its demise as an entitlement, transforming welfare for the decades that have followed. The ninth section focuses on Welfare Rights Activism, both before and after welfare reform. The tenth section’s sources examine the causes and consequences of welfare reform. Finally, the eleventh section contains sources that present information about the experiences of poor people in the years after welfare reform.

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