Despite America’s tumultuous racial history (Massey & Denton, 1993), Americans generally believe the nation has made steady, consistent progress toward achieving racial equality (Brodish, Brazy, & Devine, 2008; Eibach & Keegan, 2006; Fisman, Jakiela, Kariv, & Markovits, 2015; Kraus & Tan, 2015). Narratives highlighting America’s path toward, if not achievement of, racial equality dominate national discourse, are widely communicated in both literature and popular culture, and are strongly endorsed in attitude surveys (Reeves, 2018). In this article, we argue and offer evidence that these beliefs about the inevitable march toward racial equality, especially in the context of wealth, are overly optimistic and unfounded.

We begin with a summary of recent evidence highlighting Americans’ general optimism regarding national progress toward racial economic equality, a pattern that is particularly striking and inaccurate with respect to disparities in wealth. We then explore the motivational and cognitive processes that support and sustain these misperceptions, as well as some of the larger sociocultural and structural factors that underlie them. We then move toward a consideration of the role of psychology and psychologists in shifting the political and societal discourse regarding racial economic inequality, examining whether our understanding of the factors that undergird these misperceptions may be used in service of crafting messages to promote equity-enhancing economic policies. We close with a discussion of the potential dire implications of failing to consider the racial patterning of economic inequality, a feature of American life that is central to, yet largely misperceived in, public consciousness.

Indeed, although there has undoubtedly been some progress toward racial equality since the nation’s founding, the American racial-progress narrative, we argue, overestimates the successes and underestimates the setbacks, resulting in an unfounded optimism about racial equality in both the present and its prospects for the future. For instance, as early as 1977, the majority of respondents to the General Social Survey (2016) reported holding the belief that racial differences in many societal outcomes are no longer due to racial discrimination and, further, that job earnings and promotions are determined fairly. In a sense, even limited progress and the mechanisms that give rise to it (e.g., changes in the law) are readily reinterpreted as the goal of racial equality itself being achieved ( Eibach & Purdie-Vaughns, 2011 ). For instance, the Brown decision striking down the segregation of public schools gets misinterpreted as the attainment of racial integration (e.g., Harris & Lieberman, 2015 ). Likewise, a reduction in the acceptance of public expressions of racial prejudice gets reinterpreted as the eradication of such prejudice in the hearts and minds of Americans ( Bonilla-Silva, 2017 ; Crandall, Eshleman, & O’Brien, 2002 ; Devine, 1989 ). We propose that this pattern of overinterpretation is indicative of a widespread belief that racial inequality in most societal domains is minimal or rapidly regressing ( Bonilla-Silva, 2017 ; Eibach & Keegan, 2006 ; see also Pinkney, 1986 ). If Americans are overly optimistic about our achievement of racial equality, as we argue, then they are unlikely to consider equity-enhancing policies with the seriousness and urgency they deserve (e.g., DeBell, 2017 ). In other words, an accurate accounting of the magnitude of racial inequality in society is a prerequisite for reparative action.

A firm belief in our nation’s commitment to racial egalitarianism is a part of the collective consciousness of the United States of America. Indeed, we have a strong and persistent belief that our national disgrace of racial oppression has been overcome, albeit through struggle, and that racial equality has largely already been achieved ( Pinkney, 1986 ; Seamster & Ray, 2018 ). Take, for instance, how relatively easy it is to conjure bellwether moments of racial progress, such as the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, and the election of Barack Obama as the first Black President of the United States in 2008. By contrast, periods of retrenchment of the racial hierarchy, such as racial terror in the form of lynchings throughout the 19th century and much of the 20th, the rise of Jim Crow laws in 1877 and continuing through the 1960s, and the 1985 bombing of Black liberation activists (i.e., MOVE) by the Philadelphia police, or even the racial injustices of the present political moment (e.g., voter suppression; police-involved shootings of unarmed Black and Latinx citizens) that are often glossed over or minimized ( Anderson, 2016 ). Even under conditions in which moments of racial retrenchment and associated activism seem to shift implicit and explicit racial attitudes ( Sawyer & Gampa, 2018 ), these changes rarely manifest themselves in material progress toward racial economic equality. When it comes to race relations in the United States, in other words, most Americans hold an unyielding belief in a specific, optimistic narrative regarding racial progress that is robust to counterexamples: that society has come a very long way already and is moving rapidly and perhaps naturally toward full racial equality ( Eibach & Ehrlinger, 2006 ; Hur & Ruttan, 2019 ).

In this section, we provided evidence from a nationally representative, preregistered sample of participants that Americans overwhelmingly believe we have made considerable progress toward racial economic equality. The magnitude of some of these misperceptions is striking, particularly in the realm of the Black–White and Latinx–White wealth gaps, for which Americans seem to discount both current and historical patterns of racial discrimination in the creation and maintenance of racially disparate economic circumstances. In the sections that follow, we propose and then examine the evidence regarding several sources of these profound misperceptions, starting with motivational and cognitive processes and closing with group status and broader structural factors.

Consistent with our central thesis regarding the dominant role of the racial-progress narrative in shaping perceptions of racial economic equality, respondents underestimated both the Asian–White t (1007) = 8.69, p < .001, d = 0.27, and Latinx–White wealth gap, t (1007) = 59.54, p < .001, d = 1.88 (see Fig. 6 ). Underestimates of the Latinx–White wealth gap were similar in magnitude to estimates of the Black–White gap but, interestingly, respondents, on average, believed the Latinx–White wealth gap is larger than the Black–White wealth gap, when in reality, the opposite is true. This interesting pattern could be due to any number of sociocognitive factors, including the recent national salience of low-status refugees attempting to cross the U.S. southern border and widespread societal ignorance of the contributions of Latinx people to the nation ( Golden-Vazquez, 2019 ). Future research is necessary to examine the robustness of this pattern of misperception and its correlates, if not potential underlying mechanisms. Underestimates of the Asian–White wealth gap were more modest in size. The heightened accuracy regarding this group is probably due, at least in part, to the fact that there is actually greater wealth parity between Asian American and White families (compared with that between White and Black families and between White and Latinx families). It is also possible that greater contact between Asian Americans and Whites compared with interracial contact between Whites and other racial groups, as well as the salience of stereotypes of Asian American economic and educational success, contributed to greater accuracy regarding the Asian–White wealth gap.

Next, we examined whether Americans also underestimate the current wealth gap between White Americans and racial groups other than Black Americans. We compared perceptions of current relative Asian–White and Latinx–White family wealth with estimates calculated using federal data from 2013 ( Darity et al., 2018 ). We were primarily interested in whether perceptions of these wealth gaps might diverge, given highly accessible stereotypes of Asian Americans as high achieving in terms of education and income relative to Latinx and Black families ( Lee & Zhou, 2015 ; Zou & Cheryan, 2017 ).

A similar examination of perceptions of the Black–White wealth gap for Black and White families matched within the same U.S. income quintile revealed that respondents expected greater Black–White wealth equality as family household income increased, indicated by a significant positive linear association, F (1, 1007) = 204.78, p < .001. When we examined the accuracy of these estimates, respondents underestimated the wealth gap at all five levels of household income, t s(1007) > 33.32, p s < .001, d s > 1.05. We also found that survey respondents were relatively more accurate as income increased F (1, 1007) = 151.95, p < .001, presumably because the wealth gap is indeed smaller among families with higher income levels ( Fig. 5 ). Even at the highest level of income, at which the estimates were indeed most accurate, participants continued to grossly overestimate the current state of racial wealth equality. This linear pattern also reveals the underlying belief that higher-income Black families are most likely to have achieved economic parity, just as was observed regarding higher, relative to lower, levels of educational attainment. Together, then, these findings are consistent with the broad assertion that general beliefs in American meritocracy lead people to the mistaken perception that we are not far from Black–White wealth equality, especially at the highest levels of education and income, where the highest achieving and therefore most deserving Black Americans are found.

Analysis of respondents’ estimates of racial wealth equality for Black and White families at matched levels of head-of-family education revealed a significant linear contrast, F (1, 1007) = 615.03, p < .001; namely, respondents perceived greater racial equality at higher levels of education. Respondents underestimated the wealth gap at all five levels of head-of-family education, t s(1007) > 46.18, p s < .001, d s > 1.45 ( Fig. 4 ), and critically, respondents were less accurate at higher levels of family education, F (1, 1007) = 58.66, p < .001.

We next examined perceptions of current Black–White wealth disparities at multiple levels of family education and income. Given how pervasive meritocracy beliefs are in American society ( McLean & Syed, 2015 ; Reeves, 2018 ), we expected respondents to assume that Black families with high income and high levels of educations are also the most likely to achieve parity in our economic system relative to their White counterparts. Thus, we predicted that respondents would perceive the racial wealth gap to be smaller among Black and White families at increasing levels of income and education. To conduct this analysis, we used the same methodology but asked about Black family wealth if a White family of the same specific level of education or income had wealth of $100 (again, on the $0–$200 scale). Federal estimates of the wealth gap at various levels of education and income were compiled from the Survey of Income and Program Participation ( Darity et al., 2018 ).

As anticipated, analyses of participants’ perceptions of Black–White wealth disparities revealed a substantial underestimation of the racial wealth gap at all 12 time points, t s(1007) > 33.90, p s < .001, d s = 1.06 to 2.01. Consistent with our hypothesis regarding the role of the American racial-progress narrative, the magnitude of these overestimates increased linearly across time, F (1, 1007) = 743.20, p < .001. Respondents thought that the Black–White wealth gap was around 40 percentage points smaller than its actual size in 1963 and around 80 percentage points smaller than its actual size in 2016 ( Fig. 3 ). To further contextualize these estimates, we examined frequencies of estimates of the Black–White wealth gap when aggregated across the 12 time points. In this analysis, we found that 97.4% of respondents overestimated Black–White wealth equality by some nonzero amount, 94.5% overestimated equality by 10 or more percentage points, 89.3% overestimated equality by 20 or more percentage points, and 61.5% overestimated equality by 50 or more percentage points. Moreover, 13.7% of respondents indicated that Black wealth is higher than White wealth. Because these responses are so inconsistent with reality, one might be tempted to dismiss them as being due to mathematical errors. We caution against this sort of dismissal, however, as these data are consistent with the results of other national surveys on race. In a recent survey conducted by the Pew Foundation, for instance, 14% of White Americans said that being White leads to disadvantages in America relative to being a racial minority ( Menasce Horowitz, Brown, & Cox, 2019 ).

We took several steps in our work to mitigate these limitations. First, we reduced the number of mental steps required of our respondents by asking them to compare Whites who had $100 of wealth with the wealth of another racial group rather than asking them to consider multiple dependent comparisons of wealth between quintiles (e.g., Norton & Ariely, 2011 ). Second, by transforming percentages into whole numbers and explicitly indicating the value that constituted equality, we reduced the mathematical transformations required to complete each estimate. Similar methodological changes that reduce transformations have been found to improve calculation accuracy ( Gigerenzer & Hoffrage, 1995 ; Hoffrage, Lindsey, Hertwig, & Gigerenzer, 2000 ). Third, although economic data from federal agencies can be subject to estimation errors, here we use the best available data from the Survey of Consumer Finances ( Bricker et al., 2017 ) and the Survey of Income and Program Participation ( Darity et al., 2018 ) administered through the U.S. Census. Both surveys rely on estimates from tens of thousands of Americans, and they are consequently robust to estimation errors ( Bricker et al., 2017 ). Fourth, in our analyses, we adjust for participants’ perceptions of general wealth inequality to account for the type of individual-level sources of noise that are common to economic estimates. Fifth, as in prior research ( Norton & Ariely, 2011 ), we provided definitions for wealth and income before respondents made their estimates.

We tested these hypotheses in a preregistered nationally representative panel survey of 1,008 American adults (all materials are posted at https://osf.io/dw7es/ ). The study was approved by the institutional review board at Yale University, and all survey respondents consented to their participation in the research. Respondents reported their perceptions of the wealth of a typical Black family ($0–$200) given that the wealth of a typical White family was $100. Perceptions of the Black–White wealth gap were solicited for 12 separate years, each presented on the same survey page in random order, beginning in 1963 and ending in 2016. These perceptions were compared with federal statistics on actual family wealth split by race at each time point ( Bricker et al., 2017 ).

For these reasons, we conducted a nationally representative survey of American adults to examine perceptions of the racial wealth gap. The survey was broadly representative of the United States in terms of region, income, gender, and race (see Supplemental Material available online ). As in our prior work, we expected respondents to underestimate the racial wealth gap between Black and White Americans across time (from 1963 to 2016). We also expected the overestimates to be greater in magnitude in the present than in the past, reflecting the American narrative of racial progress.

Our analyses thus far examined perceptions of equality on a composite index of five economic outcomes, but disaggregating these findings reveals that the misperception of wealth equality is particularly severe (see Kraus et al., 2017 ). This is especially distressing given that wealth is the most consequential index of economic well-being, in that it provides a more effective safety net for families when facing unexpected financial shocks relative to other economic indicators, such as income ( Darity, Hamilton, & Stewart, 2015 ; Hamilton, Darity, Price, Sridharan, & Tippett, 2015 ). Because it takes wealth to grow wealth, it is especially important to discern the extent to which Americans are (or perhaps are not) aware of the racial wealth gap in contemporary American society. Critically, the cumulative nature of wealth makes it particularly vulnerable to the effects of both past and contemporary discriminatory policies and practices (e.g., chattel slavery, Jim Crow, redlining)—practices that helped to produce the wealth gap in the first place and make it difficult for everyday Americans to track, or perhaps acknowledge, its magnitude across time.

Though we found striking evidence in these initial analyses that Americans overestimate racial economic progress, the calculation of progress relies on difference scores and, thus, the patterns could be the result of misperceptions of racial equality in either the past or present. When we examined misperceptions at each time point separately, however, we found the pattern shown in Figure 2 : Aggregating across the five economic domains, Americans tend to be fairly accurate about racial economic equality in the past but tend to overestimate it in the present ( Kraus et al., 2017 ). The psychological basis for accuracy in these past judgments is a matter for future research. In this prior work, accuracy tended to vary as a function of the domain under examination, with the greatest accuracy for Black–White income equality and the least accuracy for wealth ( Kraus et al., 2017 ).

We argue that the American racial-progress narrative leads people to make overly optimistic estimates regarding the state of racial economic equality in the nation. We first tested this hypothesis in three studies that asked White and Black participants the following question: “If the typical White family had 100 units of each of five economic categories (i.e., income, wealth, employer-provided health benefits, wages among high-school graduates, wages among individuals with college degrees), how much would the typical Black family have?” Participants responded using a 0-to-200 scale on which a response of 100 indicated racial equality ( Kraus, Rucker, & Richeson, 2017 ). For each index, we asked participants to report these estimates at two time points, one of which was sometime in the past (between 30 and 50 years ago, depending on the index) and the other of which was a time closer to when they were completing the survey (between 2013 and 2016; i.e., current or present estimates). To examine perceptions of progress, we calculated the difference between past and current estimates of racial equality such that more positive scores indicated perceptions of greater progress toward racial economic equality. We then compared participants’ perceptions to estimates of these economic disparities calculated using the U.S. government’s current population and consumer finance surveys ( Bricker et al., 2017 ). As Figure 1 suggests, participants in each sample generated substantial overestimates of progress toward equality in each of the five economic domains. In contrast, federal estimates revealed that progress in each domain had been minimal in some domains and far below participants’ perceptions in all domains. These data suggest that Americans are largely unaware of the striking persistence of racial economic inequality in the United States.

Willful Ignorance? A Case for Motivated Social Cognition

Salient exemplars and misperceptions of racial disparities Just as the motivations to see society as fair and just support the belief in societal racial progress, so too do group stereotypes that are activated when people are asked to consider the extent of racial inequality in society. In other words, we argue that overestimates of current racial economic equality are driven, in part, by the motivated search for exemplars that are consistent with the racial-progress narrative (e.g., Bodenhausen, Schwarz, Bless, & Wänke, 1995). People have representations of social groups that are stored in memory, and the associated information that we store in memory about those groups can become relatively more or less activated by features of the environment (Bodenhausen et al., 1995). Though mental representations for many social groups overlap considerably (Kang & Bodenhausen, 2015), studies examining connections in representations of race and class are relatively rare (Sanchez & Garcia, 2012), and those studies tend to find connections between higher economic standing and higher racial-group status. In three separate studies, for instance, researchers found that mental representations of faces and traits that were more stereotypically and visually White also tended to be associated with high economic standing (Brown-Iannuzzi, Dotsch, Cooley, & Payne, 2017; Kunst, Myhren, & Onyeador, 2018; Lei & Bodenhausen, 2017). This work suggests something that at first seems inconsistent with what we have found in our research up to this point: that people should become more accurate about racial economic equality to the extent that mental representations of racial minorities become salient. But activating a racial-minority category is conceptually and empirically distinct from the selective activation of specific exemplars of a racial group, a process that is fundamentally shaped by the motivations of perceivers (Sinclair & Kunda, 1999). Indeed, research has revealed that motivations can shape which types of Black exemplars are salient for perceivers (Sinclair & Kunda, 1999), and that perceivers flexibly activate the type of Black exemplar that will best satisfy their motivational concerns. Consistent with this work, we propose that people call to mind high-status and/or high-achieving Black exemplars (e.g., Oprah Winfrey, LeBron James) when they are considering the current state of racial economic equality because such exemplars support prevailing narratives of racial progress. One implication of this argument is that the methodology we used throughout our research on these misperceptions could have affected the extent to which people overestimated current levels of racial economic equality. Recall that we asked participants first to think about the typical White family having 100 units of an economic resource and then to estimate the amount of that same resource held by a typical Black family. An anchoring perspective (Eriksson & Simpson, 2013) suggests that this method could activate a Black family that is similar to the White family initially brought to mind, in which case subsequent perceptions would overestimate racial economic equality but to a lower extent than if high status and wealthy Black exemplars are brought to mind (e.g., the Obama family). Indeed, we have found preliminary evidence for this particular pattern, in which asking about a Black family (instead of a White family) first elicits heightened overestimates of racial income equality (Kraus & Richeson, 2018). To directly test the role of exemplar salience, future studies that explicitly activate high- versus low-status Black exemplars before measuring perceptions of racial economic inequality are necessary.

Reconciling exemplars and stereotypes of Black targets Americans can acknowledge racial inequalities under many circumstances (e.g., the Black Lives Matter movement), but how those instances of acknowledgment coexist with overestimates of racial economic equality is an important topic of ongoing research. The study of exemplars suggests that people are indeed flexible in their activation of exemplars of racial groups in the service of momentary motivational concerns and contextual affordances. When making assessments of racial equality and, presumably, progress toward it, for instance, we believe that people are more likely to activate high-status exemplars of racial-minority groups, whereas they are more likely to activate low-status exemplars in other contexts, such as when considering the carceral system (Alter, Stern, Granot, & Balcetis, 2016; Brown-Iannuzzi et al., 2017; Lei & Bodenhausen, 2017). Indeed, it is possible that the same perceivers are motivated to both overestimate racial equality in the service of narratives of racial progress while also endorsing beliefs that justify the lower-status position of racial minorities, such as the overrepresentation of Black and Latinx Americans in the U.S. carceral system. We find evidence for this seemingly contradictory set of misperceptions in our own prior data (Kraus et al., 2017). In a previously unpublished analysis (N = 444) from our initial research examining estimates of Black–White economic equality, we included assessments of Black–White contact with the carceral system. Perceivers significantly overestimated the proportion of Black men in prison, mean overestimation = 15.81%, t(443) = 18.17, p < .001; Black men arrested, mean overestimation = 21.92%, t(443) = 24.60, p < .001; and Black men stopped by the police, mean overestimation = 17.11%, t(443) = 14.92, p < .001. Participants also significantly underestimated the percentages of these same outcomes for Whites, Ms = −5.38% (in prison) to −39.10% (arrested), ts(443) = −10.01 (in prison) to −47.93 (arrested), ps < .001. In Figure 8, we depict the relationship between a composite of participants’ overestimates of Black contact with the carceral system, M = 18.28, SD = 17.23, α = .73, and the composite metric for overestimates of present racial economic equality reported previously (Kraus et al., 2017). As depicted in Figure 8, though overestimates of Black–White equality and Black carceral contact are essentially opposing views—indeed, these misperceptions were negatively correlated, r(442) = −.34, p < .001—perceivers, on average, tended to overestimate both economic equality and Black contact with the carceral system, as shown by the virtual absence of participant estimates in the lower left quadrant of the figure. In other words, perceivers, on average, hold both of these conflicting views about Black Americans’ societal status and thus can generate the one that best accommodates their motivational needs or cognitive constraints at the time. One implication of the present work, then, is that situations that call for people to consider the current state of racial progress and justice are particularly likely to activate high-status Black exemplars, despite these exemplars being neither prototypical nor representative of the larger category. Examining the motivated search for narrative-supporting exemplars more directly is a necessary direction for future research. Download Open in new tab Download in PowerPoint