Omitted condition from Monkey Cage post on paying college athletes
The Monkey Cage published a post, "Racial prejudice is driving opposition to paying college athletes. Here's the evidence." I tweeted about this post in several threads, but I'm posting the information here for possible future reference and for anyone who reads the blog.
Here's the key figure from the post. The left side of the post indicates that white respondents expressed more opposition to paying college athletes after exposure to a picture of black athletes than in a control condition with no picture.
After reading the post, I noted two oddities about the figure. First, based on the logic of an experiment -- change one thing only to assess the effect of that thing -- the proper comparison for assessing racial bias among white respondents would have been comparing the effect of a photo of black athletes to the effect of a photo of white athletes; that comparison would have removed the alternate explanations that respondents expressed more opposition because a photo was shown or because a photo of athletes was shown, and not necessarily because a photo of *black* athletes was shown. Second, the data were from the CCES, which typically has team samples of 1,000 respondents; these samples are presumably intended to be a representative of the national population, so there should be more than 411 whites in a 1,000-respondent sample.
Putting two and two together suggested that there was an unreported condition in which respondents were shown a photo of white athletes. I emailed the three authors of the blog post, and to their credit I received substantive replies to my questions about the experiment. Based on the team's responses, the experiment did have a condition in which respondents were shown a photo of white athletes, and opposition to paying college athletes in this "white athletes" photo condition did not differ at p<0.05 (two-tailed test) from opposition to paying college athletes in the "black athletes" photo condition.