Non-replications of a racial backlash effect

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.

---

NOTE:

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