Predicting racial discrimination in the Rice et al. 2021 mock juror experiment

See here for a discussion of the Rice et al. 2021 mock juror experiment.

My reading of the codebook for the Rice et al. 2021 experiment is that, among other items, the pre-election survey included at least one experiment (UMA303_rand), then a battery of items measuring racism and sexism, and then at least another experiment. Then, among other items, the post-election survey included the CCES Common Content racial resentment and FIRE items, and then the mock juror experiment.

The pre-election battery of items measuring racism and sexism included three racial resentment items, a sexism battery, three stereotypes about Blacks and Whites (laziness, intelligence, and violent), and 0-to-100 feeling thermometers about Whites and about Blacks. In this post, I'll report some analyses of how well these pre-election measures predicted discrimination in the Rice et al. 2021 mock juror experiment.

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The first plot reports results among White participants who might be expected to have a pro-Black bias. For example, the first estimate is for White participants who had the lowest level of racial resentment. The dark error bars indicate 83.4% confidence intervals, to help compare estimates to each other. The lighter, longer error bars are 95% confidence intervals, which are more appropriate for comparing as estimate to a given number such as zero.

The plotted outcome is whether the participant indicated that the defendant was guilty or not guilty. The -29% for the top estimate indicates that, among White participants who had the lowest level of racial resentment on this index, the percentage that rated the Black defendant guilty was 29 percentage points lower than the percentage that rated the White defendant guilty.

The plot below reports results among White participants who might be expected to have a pro-White bias. The 26% for the top estimate indicates that, among White participants who had the highest level of racial resentment on this index, the percentage that rated the Black defendant guilty was 26 percentage points higher than the percentage that rated the White defendant guilty.

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The Stata output reports additional results, for the sentence length outcome, and for other predictors: a four-item racial resentment index from the post-election survey, plus individual stereotype items (such as for White participants who rated Blacks higher than Whites on an intelligence scale). Results for the sentence length outcome are reported for all White respondents and, in later analyses, for only those White respondents who indicated that the defendant was guilty.

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NOTE

1. Data for Rice et al. 2021 from the JOP Dataverse. Original 2018 CCES data for the UMass-A module, which I used in the aforementioned analyses. Stata code. Stata output. Pro-Black plot: dataset and code. Pro-White plot: dataset and code.