Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Existing research suggests that White individuals are morelikely to categorise biracial faces as Black in conditions ofresource scarcity. It has been theorised that this effect is dueto in-group boundaries becoming more exclusive in scarceconditions. An alternative explanation refers to implicit socio-economic association between Black individuals and lowerlevel of resources. These two approaches entail differentpredictions for Black participants performing thecategorisation task. If scarcity prompts greater in-groupexclusivity, Black participants should, ceteris paribus,categorise more biracial faces as White. If, however, scarcityinvokes socio-economic status associations, Blackparticipants should categories biracial faces in the same wayas White participants. Experiment 1, explored the effects ofpriming on White and Black groups. It provided support forthe implicit socio-economic association theory. Furthermore,experiment 2 on Asian sample, provided additional support asAsian participants showed the same pattern of response. Thepaper discusses implications of these findings.