The Monkey Cage

Careful control choice is critical to meaningful interpretation of rejecting the null-hypothesis. They compare baseline, with arguments about race and innocence .

Innocence doesn’t seem to be different from baseline, but race does. But perhaps race is the frame for crime. That is, talking about race makes interviewees think about fear and crime more strongly then other arguments, but not the racial comment itself.

It would have been nice to look at how people reacted when you told them that there was no evidence of racial bias. If you still got the higher support, then that would be evidence of a framing from race but not evidence of racial animus.

Peffley and Hurwitz say:
“…actually become more supportive of the death penalty upon learning that it discriminates against blacks”.

That is a funny turn of phrase. There is an amazing multi-leveled presumption here. I’m not going to unpack all the levels, but one is the presumption that the “targets” of the survey “learn” the “lesson” that the “masters” of the survey offer in their preamble to their survey question.

Their interpretation of their own work misinterprets the literal meaning of their own statement. Also, they don’t seem to understand that many of the sheeple have brains and might doubly resist being manipulated — and so ineptly. I, for one, would have subverted the hell out of that questionnaire had I been unfortunate enough to receive it.

Garbage.

This question doesn’t mean what P & H seem to think it means. Telling respondents that “Some people say that the death penalty is unfair because most of the people who are executed are African-Americans” is not the same as saying that some people say it’s biased. The one is about outcomes, the other process. Why should people believe that a punishment is unfair simply because it is used more often for one group versus another? If you already believe it’s fair, this suggests something about that group (they commit more or worse murders) than the fairness of the system.

What “some people say” is that state executions are racially biased holding other things constant, which is an entirely different matter.

So mentioning race can impact how people view the death penalty, but this certainly isn’t evidence for the claim that all racial arguments (or even the common ones) have this negative impact.

The last poster apprently did not read the paper. The authors were quite aware that brains might doubly resist being manipulated. This was a objective of the study

The two statements were intentionally stated in a manipulating fashion, as in a push poll. They wanted to find how support for the death penalty changed when “pushed”. For example when given a statement that innocent people may be executed, Black support for the death penality fell 16%, while white opinion was unchanged.

When given a statement that the death penality dicriminates against blacks, black support fell 12% while white support rose 12%.

These responses supported an initial hypothesis which stated that some blacks hold beliefs that the criminal justice system is unfair (is biased against them), whereas whites generally believe the system is fair.

Thus when reminded that innocent people can be excuted or given the idea that the death penalty discriminates against blacks, blacks reduced their support. Both these statements activated blacks’ belief that the system is unfair resulting in a strengthening in their opposition to the death penalty.

When reminded that innocent people can be exceuted, white people displayed no change in support. No beliefs were activated and so the result was the same as the null response (the response with no statement).

These responses supported another inital hypothesis that some whites believe that blacks commit more violent crime because they are more violent, whereas blacks in general do not believe this.

Thus, when asked about the death penalty in conjuction with an non-racial push (innocence), this belief about black criminality is not triggered and the support for the death penalty is the same as that with no push. But when this belief is activated by the racial push, support for the death penalty increased.

I think foucaltfan is arguing that some respondents are pushing back because the push was too blatant and offended respondents, something like this:

“Some people say that the death penalty is unfair because it’s mainly used by dumb rednecks to commit race genocide against African-Americans. Do you favor or oppose the death penalty for persons convicted of murder?”

Whether F’s right is another question.

heyo! nice find for a post! mmm. ok quickly.

extending what david kaib said, i don’t think the black and innocent questions are parallel and that kinda hoses things — compare the statements themselves:

= “most of the people who are executed are African Americans.”

= “too many innocent people are being executed.”

there’s a lot of context in the second one. in the first, it’s a bad argument! what’s the percentage of capital crimes? even in their footnoted example, where they say “research shows that more subtle and indirect arguments have little discernible effect on death penalty attitudes,” they don’t distinguish among arrest rates, conviction rates, and sentencing rates.

as far as i can make out, the researchers don’t say they intended to create a racial-bias question that allowed respondents to find their own reason that a decontextualized pseudo-stat was introduced to support an argument of unfairness, but to me that’s exactly what they were asking people to do — to find for themselves a reason that skin pigment and murder were connected in the question.

foucaultfan quoted the quote: “…actually become more supportive of the death penalty upon learning that it discriminates against blacks”.

which is my point. the question doesn’t tell you about discrimination, it tells you that there is an argument based on discrimination, but it doesn’t tell you how the argument is structured, leaving a good chunk of american white folks to ask themselves, “does this crappy and unfounded race-based argument reflect the liberal bias of the elite?”

because a lot of people maybe couldn’t tell the difference between an actual well-drawn case and a stupid one (as this is), their conclusion doesn’t seem to fall apart:

“Because whites tend to fall heavily toward the dispositional end of the black causes of crime scale, it is no small wonder that when such views are activated (as in the racial treatment), whites collectively are highly resistant to the argument that the death penalty is racially unfair. Many whites begin with the belief that the reason blacks are punished is because they deserve it, not because the system is racially biased against them. So when these whites are confronted with an argument against the death penalty that is based on race, they reject these arguments with such force that they end up expressing more support for the death penalty than when no argument is presented at all.”

but i don’t think they did this right. to fix it, they probably needed a third question, like:

“some people say that the death penalty is unfair because white people who are convicted of murder are much less likely to be sent to death row. do you favor or oppose the death penalty for persons convicted of murder?”

..when given a statement that innocent people may be executed, Black support for the death penality fell 16%, while white opinion was unchanged.

This helps explain why we have the guantanmo torture center still active despite persistent reports that the majority of people there are innocent. White people don’t really care (or pay attention to doubts) about someone’s innocence.

> White people don’t really care (or pay attention to doubts) about someone’s innocence.

While that is one interpretation, I would tend towards a second one: those who do care about someone’s innocence have already decided that the current implementation of capital punishment is royally fucked up.

-fred

Maybe people are more likely to support the death penalty when they feel it has the least chance of actually effecting them personally, that is, when the punishment applies to another race, to people from a different section of the country, or people of a different age or socio-economic status.

i.e. “Some people say that the death penalty is unfair because most of the people who are executed are not you. Do you favor or oppose the death penalty for persons convicted of murder?”