Racial Assumptions Color the Mental Representation of Social Class

We investigated the racial content of perceivers’ mental images of different socioeconomic categories. We selected participants who were either high or low in prejudice toward the poor. These participants saw 400 pairs of visually noisy face images. Depending on condition, participants chose the face that looked like a poor person, a middle-income person, or a rich person. We averaged the faces selected to create composite images of each social...