Racial discrimination among Black mock jurors, from Rice et al. 2021 JOP
Forthcoming at the Journal of Politics is Rice et al. 2021 "Same As It Ever Was? The Impact of Racial Resentment on White Juror Decision-Making". In contrast to the forthcoming Peyton and Huber 2021 article at the Journal of Politics that I recently blogged about, Rice et al. 2021 reported evidence that racial resentment predicted discrimination among Whites.
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Rice et al. 2021 concerned a mock juror experiment regarding an 18-year-old starting point guard on his high school basketball team who was accused of criminal battery. Participants indicated whether the defendant was guilty or not guilty and suggested a prison sentence length from 0 to 60 months for the defendant. The experimental manipulation was that the target was randomly assigned to be named Bradley Schwartz or Jamal Gaines.
Section 10 of the Rice et al. 2021 supplementary material has nice plots of the estimated discrimination at given levels of racial resentment, indicating, for the guilty outcome, that White participants at low racial resentment were less likely to indicate that Jamal was guilty compared to Bradley, but that White participants at high racial resentment were more likely to indicate that Jamal was guilty compared to Bradley. Results were similar for the sentence length outcome, but the 95% confidence interval at high racial resentment overlaps zero a bit.
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The experiment did not detect sufficient evidence of racial bias among White participants as a whole. But what about Black participants? Results indicated a relatively large favoring of Jamal over Bradley among Black participants, in unweighted data (N=41 per condition). For guilt, the bias was 29 percentage points in unweighted analyses, and 33 percentage points in weighted analyses. For sentence length, the bias was 8.7 months in unweighted analyses, and 9.4 months in weighted analyses, relative to a unweighted standard deviation of 16.1 months in sentence length among Black respondents.
Results for the guilty/not guilty outcome:
Results for the mean sentence length outcome:
The p-value was under p=0.05 for my unweighted tests of whether the size of the discrimination among Whites (about 7 percentage points for guilty, about 1.3 months for sentence length) differed from the size of the discrimination among Blacks (about 29 percentage points for guilty, about 8.7 months for sentence length); the inference is the same for weighted analyses. The evidence is even stronger considering that the point estimate of discrimination among Whites was in the pro-Jamal direction and not in the pro-ingroup direction.
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NOTES
1. Data for Rice et al. 2021 from the JOP Dataverse. Original 2018 CCES data for the UMass-A module, which I used in the aforementioned analyses. Stata code. Stata output. "Guilty" plot: data and R code. "Sentence length" plot: data and R code.
2. I plan to publish a follow-up post about evidence for validity of racial resentment from the Rice et al. 2021 results, plus a follow-up post about how well different measures predicted racial bias in the experiment.
I could imagine blacks being rather protective of a black "starting point guard" as being potential asset to the community. The point guard is the floor leader of the basketball team who, as the shortest player on the court, won the job over the most competition.
In general, the black community is more pro-jock than the white community. There was a big anti-bullying moral panic against masculine white males in this century that led to widely fallen-for anti-white hate hoaxes like Duke Lacrosse and UVA fraternity initiation gang rape on broke glass.
In contrast, blacks tend to take the older and perhaps saner view that jocks are the community's natural leaders. So, if a high testosterone young man got a little carried away and beat somebody up, well, in the big picture is that so bad?
Also, giving the white point guard the rather Jewish-sounding name of Bradley Schwarz seems like a methodological mistake because it raises issues of black anti-Semitism. Bradley Schultz would be a more generic white name.
I think I would have gone with Bradley Smith vs. Darnell Jones.
Hi Steve,
For what it's worth, in the ANES 2020 Time Series Study, a higher percentage of Blacks rated Whites below 50 on a 0-to-100 feeling thermometer, compared to the percentage of Blacks that rated Jews below 50 on a 0-to-100 feeling thermometer (https://www.ljzigerell.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/ANES-2020-TS-FT-whites-jews.pdf). The two mean ratings were pretty similar, with overlapping 83.4% confidence intervals. But I think that it's correct that the name Schwartz raises the possibility of anti-Semitism in a way that a name such as Smith wouldn't.