Comments on "Racial conservatism, self-monitoring, and perceptions of police violence"

Study 1 of Strickler and Lawson 2020 "Racial conservatism, self-monitoring, and perceptions of police violence" in Politics, Groups, and Identities was an experiment in which participants rated how justified a police shooting was. The experiment had a control condition, a "stereotype" condition in which the officer was White and the suspect Black, and a "counterstereotype" condition in which the officer was Black and the suspect White.

The article indicates that:

And while racial resentment did not moderate how whites responded to treatment in the White Officer/Black Victim condition, it did impact response to treatment in the Black Officer/White Victim condition. As Table 3 and Figure 4 demonstrate, for whites, those with higher levels of racial resentment are significantly less likely to view shooting as justified if it involves a black officer and a white victim.

However, the 95% confidence interval in the aforementioned Figure 4 crosses zero at high levels of racial resentment. I emailed lead author Ryan Strickler for the data and code, which he provided.

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Instead of using a regression to estimate the outcome at higher levels of racial resentment, I'll estimate the outcome for only participants at given ranges of racial resentment (see Hainmueller et al. 2019). This way, inferences about particular groups are based on data for only those groups.

Plots below report point estimates and 95% confidence intervals from tests comparing the outcome across conditions, at various ranges of racial resentment, among all White respondents or among Whites who responded correctly to manipulation checks about the officer's race and the suspect's race. Racial resentment was coded from 1 through 17.

The outcome for the first four plots was whether the participant indicated that the officer's actions were justified.

In the top left plot, the top estimate is for White participants at the highest observed level of racial resentment. The estimate is positive 0.06, which indicates that high racial resentment participants in the stereotypic condition were 6 percentage points more likely to rate the shooting as justified, compared to high racial resentment participants in the counterstereotypic condition; however, the 95% confidence interval crosses zero. The next lower estimate compared outcomes for White participants at a racial resentment of 16 and 17. The bottom estimate (RR>=1) is for all White participants, and the negative point estimate for this bottom estimate indicates that White participants in the counterstereotypic shooting condition were more likely to rate the shooting as justified, compared to White participants in the stereotypic shooting condition.

The evidence for bias among Whites high in racial resentment is a bit stronger in the right panels, which compared the counterstereotypic condition to the control condition, but the 95% confidence intervals still overlap zero. There is an exception among White participants who scored 14 or higher on the racial resentment scale, when excluding participants who did not pass the post-treatment manipulation check, but it's not a good idea to exclude participants after the treatment.

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Tables in the main text of Strickler and Lawson 2020 reported results for a dichotomous outcome coded 1 if, for the first item of the branching, the respondent indicated that the officer's actions were justified. But tables in the appendix used ratings of the extent to which the shooting was justified, measured using branched items that placed respondents into nine levels, from "a great deal certain" that the shooting was not justified to "a great deal certain" that the shooting was justified.

The plots below report results from tests that compared conditions for this ordinal measure of justification, placed on a 0-to-1 scale. Evidence in the right panel is a bit stronger using this outcome, compared to the dichotomous outcome. Like before, the top estimate is for White participants at the highest observed level of racial resentment. Middle estimates (RR>=1 and RR<=17) are for all Whites; below that, estimates are for more extreme levels of low racial resentment, ending with RR==1, for White participants at the lowest observed level of racial resentment.

Results for Whites who passed the manipulation checks are in the output file.

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NOTES

1. Thanks to Ryan Strickler for sending me data and code for the article.

2. Stata code and R code for my analyses. Data for the first four plots. Data for the final two plots.