New publication: Perceived Discrimination against Black Americans and White Americans

Meta-Psychology has published my manuscript "Perceived Discrimination against Black Americans and White Americans".

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Norton and Sommers 2011 presented evidence for a claim that has become widely cited, that "Whites have now come to view anti-White bias as a bigger societal problem than anti-Black bias". I was skeptical of that claim, so I checked the data for the American National Election Studies 2012 Time Series Study, which was the most recent ANES Time Series Study available at the time. These ANES data contradicted that claim.

I preregistered an analysis of the then-upcoming ANES 2016 Time Series Study and then preregistered an analysis of an item on a 2017 survey that YouGov conducted for me with different wording for the measure of perceived discrimination.

Each of these three sets of data indicated that a higher percentage of Whites reported the perception that there is more discrimination in the United States today against Blacks than against Whites, compared to the percentage of Whites that reported the perception that there is more discrimination in the United States today against Whites than against Blacks. And it's not particularly close. Here is a new data point: in weighted analyses of data from the ANES 2020 Time Series Study, 63% of non-Hispanic Whites rated discrimination against Blacks as larger than discrimination against Whites, but only 8% of non-Hispanic Whites rated discrimination against Whites as larger than discrimination against Blacks.

The Meta-Psychology article has an explanation for why the Norton and Sommers 2011 claim appears to be incorrect.

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NOTE

1. Data source: American National Election Studies. 2021. ANES 2020 Time Series Study Preliminary Release: Combined Pre-Election and Post-Election Data [dataset and documentation]. March 24, 2021 version. www.electionstudies.org.