Black and poor people are more frequently convicted of committing crimes. However, the specific role played by skin color and social class in convicting a person has yet to be clarified. This article aims to elucidate this issue by proposing that belonging to a lower social class facilitates the conviction of black targets and that this phenomenon is because information about social class dissimulates racial bias. Study 1 (N = 160) demonstrated that information about belonging to the lower classes increases agreement with a criminal suspect being sentenced to prison only when described as being black. Furthermore, Studies 2 (N = 170) and 3 (N = 174) show that the anti-prejudice norm inhibits discrimination against the black target when participants were asked to express individual racial prejudice, but not when they expressed cultural racial prejudice. Finally, Study 4 (N = 134) demonstrated that lower-class black targets were discriminated against to a greater degree when participants expressed either individual or cultural prejudice and showed that this occurs when racial and class anti-prejudice norms are salient. The results suggest that social class negatively affects judgments of black targets because judgment based on lower class mitigates the racist motivation of discrimination.

Introduction

Black and poor people are disproportionately more convicted of crimes for which judges assign longer sentences [1] so they are strikingly overrepresented in the prison population. For instance, in the USA, black Americans are incarcerated at a rate of more than five times that of whites [2]. In Portugal, in which this study was carried out, this scenario is no different. Due to its colonial past, Portugal has historically been a destination for immigration of black people mainly from the former Portuguese-Speaking African Colonies (PSAC). Although predominates in the Portuguese imaginary the luso-tropicalism ideology, referring to the idea of a supposed Portuguese ability for biological and cultural miscegenation with the peoples from tropics constituting a harmonious multiracial society [3], Portugal is not an exception in the scenario of racial attitudes and behaviors. Data from 2016 show that, proportionally, the rate of incarceration among the PSAC immigrants and PSAC descendants is 10 times higher compared with Portuguese citizens [4]. In addition, the proportion of black and white incarceration in Portugal may be even more unequal, since the Portuguese Constitution prohibits collecting ethnic-racial data in official surveys.

A similar phenomenon occurs with people from low social class, with these people from lower classes being more incarcerated than people from the upper classes [5,6]. The disparity becomes more pronounced when the two categories are combined, revealing a racially based class disparity in imprisonment: black Americans from the low social classes are much more incarcerated than white people from any social class [7]. This is ubiquitous in the world [1,7], which clearly suggests that racial and class inequalities in the prison population are a pervasive phenomenon. However, this has not yet been satisfactorily addressed from a social psychological point of view. In fact, social class has received less attention in studies on discrimination, particularly in terms of its interaction with skin color [8], highlighting a gap in the prejudice-discrimination literature, which has only recently been addressed [9,10].

One possible explanation for race-based social class disparity in prisons might be merely formal. At first sight, black people from lower social classes would be more often convicted because they cannot afford good lawyers. That is, black individuals would be convicted at higher rates more for being poor than for being black. Indeed, although we find white and black people in all social classes, official data indicate there is a correlation between being black and belonging to more disadvantaged social classes [11]. In light of this social reality, it is common for individuals to associate characteristics related to the lower social class with stereotypes about blacks [10,12]. This effect is in line with what Jones [13] claimed in his classic textbook Prejudice and Racism: “one of the big difficulties we have is disentangling race from class, given that (…) blacks, in particular, and ethnic minorities in general, are found disproportionately in the lower economic strata” (p. 441).

This difficulty seems to be more prominent in the context of racially based class disparity when convicting individuals accused of crimes. For instance, if both categories—skin color and social class—exert an influence independent of the other [14], then one would find similar proportions of black and white individuals from lower social classes in the prison population, which is not the case [7]. Since lower-class black people are proportionally more incarcerated than white ones from the same social class, it is very probable that skin color is a primary factor in convicting decisions, which can indicate that black people are convicted more for being black than for being poor. Thus, it necessary to take into account together information about social class and skin color in the process of making a decision [10,15,16], especially about convicting individuals accused of crimes.

The current work presents a research program with the objective of better understanding the effects of skin color and socioeconomic class in convicting black and white individuals in a Portuguese context. Studies that have addressed the relationship between skin color and social class were conducted predominantly in an USA context [9,10], exposing a gap of studies about this subject in other contexts, such as in Portugal. In this sense, the present study aims to evaluate the effect of skin color and socioeconomic class in conviction in a previously under-researched cultural context within social psychology literature of prejudice and discrimination. There is no clear evidence to which extent psychological biases toward the effect of skin color and social class in conviction observed in USA context are the same observed in Portugal or in which extent they differ between these two contexts, since race relations in these two countries have historically occurred in different ways.

Despite these differences, in both contexts the proportion of convicted poor black people is much higher than that of their white counterparts, then information about social class is likely to affect black and white targets differently. This disproportion suggests that belonging to the lower social class facilitates the conviction of black defendants, increasing the disparity of color in prisons. Accordingly, we propose that information about belonging to a lower socioeconomic class negatively affects judgments of black people but not white people. This differential effect can occur because of at least two main reasons. First, it is already known that when more than one social category of a target is salient, people need to integrate multiple pieces of information to form an overall impression about the target, especially in the absence of any contextual dominance of one category over the other (i.e., the cross-categorization effect) [17]. The cross-categorization between skin color and socioeconomic class can create salient stereotyped information for a target in both dimensions (lower class black). In this case, the effects of each dimension are integrated [18], which means that people can discriminate more against a person who belongs to multiple disadvantaged out-groups (lower class black), as opposed to someone who belongs to a single out-group (black without information of their social class) or to someone who belongs to a positive in-group in a less-favored dimension (i.e., lower class white).

Second, given that the proportion of poor blacks convicted is much higher than that of whites, social class information is likely to affect blacks and whites differently. This disproportion suggests that the social class facilitates the conviction of blacks, increasing the disparity between black and whites in prisons. Thus, it is likely that belonging to the lower classes can facilitate discrimination against black people because it can mitigate the racial motivation to convict a black target. In this sense, prejudiced people can discriminate against a lower-class black target, using a non-racist justification, even in social contexts where the anti-prejudice norm prohibits racial discrimination [19,20]. Moreover, we go further by proposing that the race-based class disparity in prison sentences is motivated by cultural prejudice (stereotypes and prejudices that are culturally shared) amplifying the discrimination toward black people and lower classes, despite the anti-prejudice norm.