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By Posted on Posted in Race No Comments

Here are four items typically used to measure symbolic racism, in which respondents are asked to indicate their level of agreement with the statements:

1. Irish, Italians, Jewish and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without any special favors.

2. Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class.

3. Over the past few years, blacks have gotten less than they deserve.

4. It's really a matter of some people not trying hard enough; if blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites.

These four items are designed such that an antiblack racist would tend to respond the same way as a non-racist principled conservative. Many researchers realize this conflation problem and make an effort to account for this conflation. For example, here is an excerpt from Rabinowitz, Sears, Sidanius, and Krosnick 2010, explaining how responses to symbolic racism items might be influenced in part by non-racial values:

Adherence to traditional values—without concomitant racial prejudice—could drive Whites' responses to SR [symbolic racism] measures and their opinions on racial policy issues. For example, Whites' devotion to true equality may lead them to oppose what they might view as inherently inequitable policies, such as affirmative action, because it provides advantages for some social groups and not others. Similarly affirmative action may be perceived to violate the traditional principle of judging people on their merits, not their skin color. Consequently, opposition to such policies may result from their perceived violation of widely and closely held principles rather than racism.

However, this nuance is sometimes lost. Here is an excerpt from the Pasek, Krosnick, and Tompson 2012 manuscript that was discussed by the Associated Press shortly before the 2012 presidential election:

Explicit racial attitudes were gauged using questions designed to measure "Symbolic Racism" (Henry & Sears, 2002).

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The proportion of Americans expressing explicit anti-Black attitudes held steady between 47.6% in 2008 and 47.3% in 2010, and increased slightly and significantly to 50.9% in 2012.

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See here and here for a discussion of the Pasek et al. 2012 manuscript.

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By Posted on Posted in Race No Comments

From the abstract of Bucolo and Cohn 2010 (gated, ungated):

'Playing the race card' reduced White juror racial bias as White jurors' ratings of guilt for Black defendants were significantly lower when the defence attorney's statements included racially salient statements. White juror ratings of guilt for White defendants and Black defendants were not significantly different when race was not made salient.

The second sentence reports that white mock juror ratings of guilt were not significantly different for black defendants and white defendants when race was not made salient, but the first sentence claims that "playing the race card" reduced white juror racial bias. But if the data can't support the inference that there is bias without the race card ("not significantly different"), then how can the data support the inference that "playing the race card" reduced bias?

For the answer, let's look at the Results section (p. 298). Guilt ratings were reported on a scale from -5 (definitely not guilty) to +5 (definitely guilty):

A post hoc t test (t(75) = .24, p = .81) revealed that ratings of guilt for a Black defendant (M = 1.10, SD = 2.63) were not significantly different than ratings of guilt for a White defendant (M = .95, SD = 2.92) when race was not made salient. When race was made salient, a post hoc t test (t(72) = 3.57, p =.001) revealed that ratings of guilt were significantly lower for a Black defendant (M = -1.32, SD = 2.91) than a White defendant (M = 1.31, SD = 2.96).

More simply, when race was not made salient, white mock jurors rated the black defendant roughly 5% of a standard deviation more guilty than the white defendant, which is a difference that would often fall within the noise created by sampling error (p=0.81). However, when race was made salient by playing the race card, white mock jurors rated the black defendant roughly 90% of a standard deviation less guilty than the white defendant, which is a difference that would often not fall within the noise created by sampling error (p=0.001).

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Here is how Bucolo and Cohn 2010 was described in a 2013 statement from the Peace Psychology division of the American Psychological Association:

Ignoring race often harms people of color, primarily because biases and stereotypes go unexamined. A study by Donald Bucolo and Ellen Cohn at the University of New Hampshire found that the introduction of race by the defense attorney of a hypothetical Black client reduced the effects of racial bias compared to when race was not mentioned (Bucolo & Cohn, 2010). One error in the state's approach in the George Zimmerman murder trial may have been the decision to ignore issues of race and racism.

But a change from 5% of a standard deviation bias against black defendants to 90% of a standard deviation bias against white defendants is not a reduction in the effects of racial bias.

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Note that the point of this post is not to present Bucolo and Cohn 2010 as representative of racial bias in the criminal justice system. There are many reasons to be skeptical of the generalizability of experimental research on undergraduate students acting as mock jurors at a university with few black students. Rather, the point of the post is to identify another example of selective concern in social science.

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By Posted on Posted in Race No Comments

Jeffrey A. Segal and Albert D. Cover developed the Segal-Cover scores that are widely used to proxy the political ideology of Supreme Court nominees. Segal-Cover scores are described here (gated) and here (ungated). The scores are based on the coding of newspaper editorials, with each paragraph in the editorial coded as liberal, conservative, moderate, or not applicable (p. 559).

Segal and Cover helpfully provided examples of passages that would cause a paragraph to be coded as liberal, conservative, or moderate. Here is Segal and Cover's first example of a passage that would cause a paragraph to be coded liberal:

Scarcely more defensible were the numerous questions about Judge Harlan's affiliation with the Atlantic Union. The country would have a sorry judiciary indeed, if appointees were to be barred for belonging to progressive and respectable organizations.

Here is Segal and Cover's first example of a passage that would cause a paragraph to be coded conservative:

Judge Carswell himself admits to some amazement now at what he said in that 1948 speech. He should, for his were the words of pure and simple racism.

I can't think of a better example of conservatism than that.

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By Posted on Posted in Race No Comments

Vox has a post about racial bias and police shootings. The story by Vox writer Jenée Desmond-Harris included quotes from Joshua Correll, who investigated racial bias in police shootings with a shooter game, in his co-authored 2007 study, "Across the Thin Blue Line: Police Officers and Racial Bias in the Decision to Shoot" (gated, ungated).

Desmond-Harris emphasized the Correll et al. 2007 finding about decision time:

When Correll performed his experiment specifically on law enforcement officers, he found that expert training significantly reduced their fatal mistakes overall, but no matter what training they had, most participants were quicker to shoot at a black target.

For readers who only skim the Vox story, this next sentence appears in larger blue font:

No matter what training they had, most participants were quicker to shoot at a black target.

That finding, about the speed of the response, is fairly characterized as racial bias. But maybe you're wondering whether the law enforcement officers in the study were more likely to incorrectly shoot the black targets than the white targets. That's sort of important, right? Well, Desmond-Harris does not tell you that. But you can open the link to the Correll et al. 2007 study and turn to page 1020, where you will find this passage:

For officers (and, temporarily, for trained undergraduates), however, the stereotypic interference ended with reaction times. The bias evident in their latencies did not translate to the decisions they ultimately made.

I wonder why the Vox writer did not mention that research finding.

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I doubt that the aggregate level of racial bias in the decision of police officers to shoot is exactly zero, and it is certainly possible that other research has found or will find such a nonzero bias. Let me know if you are aware of any such studies.

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By Posted on Posted in Methods No Comments

The American National Election Studies 2008 Time Series Study included an Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP) that measured implicit attitudes. The 2008 ANES User's Guide, located here, noted that, "[d]uring this module, respondents attributed a 'pleasant' or 'unpleasant' characteristic to Chinese-character graphic images, each of which was displayed to the respondent following a briefly flashed photo image of a young male."

Here are the photos of the young males, from Appendix A:

ANES AMP Faces

As you can see, this procedure measured implicit attitudes about mustaches.

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By Posted on Posted in Race No Comments

Ian Ayres in the New York Times describes an experiment:

With more than 1,500 observations, the study uncovered substantial, statistically significant race discrimination. Bus drivers were twice as willing to let white testers ride free as black testers (72 percent versus 36 percent of the time). Bus drivers showed some relative favoritism toward testers who shared their own race, but even black drivers still favored white testers over black testers (allowing free rides 83 percent versus 68 percent of the time).

The title of Ayres' op-ed was: "When Whites Get a Free Pass: Research Shows White Privilege Is Real."

The op-ed linked to this study, by Redzo Mujcic and Paul Frijters, which summarized some of the study's results in the figure below:

Mujcic Frijters

The experiment involved members of four races, but the op-ed ignored results for Asians and Indians. I can't think of a good reason to ignore results for Asians and Indians, but it does make it easier for Ayres to claim that:

A field experiment about who gets free bus rides in Brisbane, a city on the eastern coast of Australia, shows that even today, whites get special privileges, particularly when other people aren't around to notice.

It would be nice if the blue, red, green, and orange bars in the figure were all the same height. But it would also be nice if the New York Times would at least acknowledge that there were four bars.

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H/T Claire Lehmann

Related: Here's what the New York Times did not mention about teacher grading bias

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By Posted on Posted in Public opinion No Comments

Here is the title and abstract to my 2015 MPSA proposal:

A Troublesome Belief? Social Inequality and Belief in Human Biological Differences

In A Troublesome Inheritance, Nicholas Wade speculated that biological differences might help explain inequality of outcomes between human groups. Reviewers suggested that Wade's speculations might encourage xenophobia, so, to understand the possible attitudinal consequences of such a belief, I develop predictions based on the expectation that belief in a biological explanation for group-level social inequalities reduces the perceived need for policies to reduce these inequalities. General Social Survey data supported predictions that this belief is correlated with lower support for policies to reduce sexual inequalities, support for greater social distance between racial groups, more support for traditional sex roles, and less support for immigration, but did not indicate a correlation with aggregate support for policies to reduce racial inequalities. I further developed and tested predictions regarding the possibility that persons who perceive biological differences to have resulted from unguided processes such as Darwinian evolution adopt more progressive attitudes toward social inequalities than persons who perceive biological differences to have resulted from guided processes such as intelligent design.

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UPDATE (Nov 5, 2014)

The "Troublesome Belief" proposal was accepted for the MPSA public opinion panel, "Using public opinion to gauge democracy and the good life."

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UPDATE (Mar 10, 2015)

Draft of the manuscript for the MPSA presentation is here. Data are here. Code is here.

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UPDATE (Mar 23, 2015)

Updated draft of the manuscript for the MPSA presentation is here. Data are here. Code is here. Thanks to Emil Ole William Kirkegaard for helpful comments.

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UPDATE (Feb 13, 2016)

Updated draft of the manuscript is here.

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