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Month: August 2017

By Posted on Posted in Race, Reproductions No Comments

One notable finding in the racial discrimination literature is the boomerang/backlash effect reported in Peffley and Hurwitz 2007:

"...whereas 36% of whites strongly favor the death penalty in the baseline condition, 52% strongly favor it when presented with the argument that the policy is racially unfair" (p. 1001).

The racially-unfair argument shown to participants was: "[Some people say/FBI statistics show] that the death penalty is unfair because most of the people who are executed are African Americans" (p. 1002). Statistics reported in Peffley and Hurwitz 2007 Table 1 indicate that responses differed at p<=0.05 for Whites in the baseline no-argument condition compared to Whites in the argument condition.

However, the boomerang/backlash effect did not appear at p<=0.05 in large-N MTurk direct and conceptual replication attempts reported on in Butler et al. 2017 or in my analysis of a nearly-direct replication attempt using a large-N sample of non-Hispanic Whites in a TESS study by Spencer Piston and Ashley Jardina with data collection by GfK, with a similar null result for a similar racial-bias-argument experiment regarding three strikes laws.

For the weighted TESS data, on a scale from 0 for strongly oppose to 1 for strongly favor, support for the death penalty for persons convicted of murder was 0.015 units lower (p=0.313, n=2018) in the condition in which participants were told "Some people say that the death penalty is unfair because most of the people who are executed are black", compared to the condition in which participants did not receive that statement, with controls for the main experimental conditions for the TESS study, which appeared earlier in the survey. This lack of statistical significance remained when the weighted sample was limited to liberals and extreme liberals; slight liberals, liberals, and extreme liberals; conservatives and extreme conservatives; and slight conservatives, conservatives, and extreme conservatives. There was also no statistically-significant difference between conditions in my analysis of the unweighted data. Regarding missing data, 7 of 1,034 participants in the control condition and 9 of 1,000 participants in the experimental condition did not provide a response.

Moreover, in the prior item on the survey, on a 0-to-1 scale, responses were 0.013 units higher (p=0.403, n=2025) for favoring three strikes laws in the condition in which participants were told that "...critics argue that these laws are unfair because they are especially likely to affect black people", compared to the compared to the condition in which participants did not receive that statement, with controls for the main experimental conditions for the TESS study, which appeared earlier in the survey. This lack of statistical significance remained when the weighted sample was limited to liberals and extreme liberals; slight liberals, liberals, and extreme liberals; conservatives and extreme conservatives; and slight conservatives, conservatives, and extreme conservatives. There was also no statistically-significant difference between conditions in my analysis of the unweighted data. Regarding missing data, 6 of 986 participants in the control condition and 3 of 1,048 participants in the experimental condition did not provide a response.

Null results might be attributable to participants not paying attention, so it is worth noting that the main treatment in the TESS experiment was that participants in one of the three conditions were given a passage to read entitled "Genes May Cause Racial Difference in Heart Disease" and participants in another of the three conditions were given a passage to read entitled "Social Conditions May Cause Racial Difference in Heart Disease". There was a statically-significant difference between these conditions in responses to an item about whether there are biological differences between blacks and whites (p=0.008, n=2,006), with responses in the Genes condition indicating greater estimates of biological differences between blacks and whites.

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NOTE:

Data for the TESS study are available here. My Stata code is available here.

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By Posted on Posted in Race No Comments

Continuing from a Twitter thread that currently ended here...

Hi Jenn,

I don't think that it's disingenuous to compare two passages that assess discrimination in decision-making based on models of decision-making that lack measures of relevant non-discriminatory factors that could influence decisions. At that level of abstraction, the two passages are directly comparable.

My perception is that:

The evidence of discrimination against Asian Americans in the cited study about college admissions is stronger than the evidence of discrimination against Asian Americans in the cited study about earnings; therefore, not accepting the evidence of discrimination in the college admissions study as evidence of true discrimination suggests that the evidence of discrimination in the earnings study should also not be accepted as evidence of true discrimination.

I perceive the evidence of discrimination in the college admissions study to be stronger because [1] net of included controls, the college admissions gap appears to be larger than the earnings gap, [2] the college admissions study appears to have fewer and fewer important inferential issues involving samples and included controls [*], and [3] compared to decision-making about which applicants are admitted to a college, decision-making about how much a worker should be paid presumably involves more important information about relevant non-discriminatory factors that have not been included in the statistical control of the studies.

Moreover, including evidence from outside these studies, legal cases involving racial discrimination in college admissions have often involved decision-making that explicitly includes race as a factor. My presumption is that a larger percentage of recent college admissions decisions have been made in which race is an explicit factor in admissions compared to the percentage of recent earnings decisions that have been made in which race is an explicit factor in worker remuneration.

For what it's worth, I think that a residual net racial discrimination is likely across a large number of important decisions made in the absence of perfect information, such as decisions involving college admissions and earnings, and I think that it is reasonable to accept evidence of discrimination against Asian Americans based on the studies cited in both passages.

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[*] Support for [2] above:

[2a] The study that reported an 8% earnings gap was limited to data for men age 25 to 64 with a college degree who were participating in the labor market. Estimates for comparing earnings of White men to earnings of Asian men should be expected to be skewed to the extent that White men and Asian men with the same earnings potential have a different probability of being a college graduate or have a different probability of being in the labor market.

[2b] I don't think that naively controlling for cost of living is correct because higher costs of living partly reflect job perks that should not be completely controlled for. If, after adjusting for cost of living, a person who works in San Francisco has the same equivalent earnings as a person who works in an uncomfortably-humid rural lower-cost-of-living area with few amenities, the person who works in San Francisco is nonetheless better off in terms of climate and access to amenities.

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I'm not sure that selectivity in immigration is relevant. The earnings models control for factors such as highest degree, field of study for the highest degree, and Carnegie classification of the school for the highest degree. It's possible that, net of these controls, Asian American men workers have higher earnings potential than White American men workers, but I'm not aware of evidence for this.

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