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This post discusses three unpublished studies that I don't expect to be working on in the foreseeable future.

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1.

I posted at APSA Preprints "The Yuge Effect of Racist Resentment on Support for Donald Trump and…Attitudes about Automobile Fuel Efficiency Requirements?". This paper reports evidence indicating that a published measure of "racist resentment" does a remarkably good job predicting non-racial outcome variables such as environmental policy preferences. Sample results are at this prior post.

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2.

I posted at OSF a write-up of results for a preregistered study "Belief in Genetic Differences and Support for Efforts to Reduce Inequality". I reported these data in an unaccepted proposal for a short study with the Time-sharing Experiments for the Social Science.

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3.

Data for the second study and this third study are from a 2017 YouGov survey that I had conducted using funds from Illinois State University New Faculty Start-up Support and the Illinois State University College of Arts and Sciences. My initial plan was to run a version of my 2014 TESS proposal, but I saw the Carney and Enos paper (current version) in the 2015 MPSA program and realized that their experiments were similar to my plan, so I changed the survey.

Here is an early version of the planned survey.

One element of the new survey was an experiment involving attitudes about food stamps. I planned for the final three slides to each include an item about poor Americans, with the third item being randomly assigned to be about either poor White Americans or poor Black Americans. The third item was:

Most [randomize: poor Black Americans/poor White Americans] who receive government welfare could get along without it if they tried.

Carney and Enos had done something similar with the traditional racial resentment items, but these traditional racial resentment items aren't particularly good at measuring resentment (such as "Over the past few years, blacks have gotten less than they deserve"). The "could get along without it if they tried" is an old racial resentment item that wasn't included on the traditional four-item battery, but I think it does a nice job of capturing resentment.

I posted at OSF a write-up of results from this "unnecessary welfare experiment". I submitted to a journal a more extensive analysis and discussion, but the manuscript was rejected in peer review.

The "unnecessary welfare experiment" research design might have caused the estimated differences to be underestimates, given that the prior two items had the same response scale and were about poor Americans in general. Nonetheless, the results provide evidence that, in 2017, non-Hispanic White conservatives and non-Hispanic Whites in general reported more agreement that most poor Black Americans who receive government welfare could get along without it if they tried, compared to their reported agreement to the same statement about poor White Americans who receive government welfare.

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According to the 20 Dec 2018 Samuel Perry and Andrew Whitehead Huffington Post article "What 'Make America Great Again' And 'Merry Christmas' Have In Common":

Christian theology, identity or faithfulness have nothing to do with an insistence on saying "Merry Christmas." To be more precise, when we analyzed public polling data, we found that there was no correlation between being an evangelical Christian, believing in the biblical Nativity story, attending church, or participating in charitable giving and rejecting "Season's Greetings" for "Merry Christmas." [emphasis added]

The referenced data are from a December 2013 Public Religion Research Initiative survey. Item Q5 is the "Merry Christmas" item:

Do you think stores and businesses should greet their customers with 'Happy Holidays' or 'Seasons Greetings' instead of 'Merry Christmas' out of respect for people of different faiths, or not? (Q5)

Item Q6 is the biblical Nativity belief item:

Do you believe the story of Christmas -- that is, the Virgin birth, the angelic proclamation to the Shepherds, the Star of Bethlehem, and the Wise Men from the East -- is historically accurate, or is it a theological story to affirm faith in Jesus? (Q6)

Here is the crosstab for the "Merry Christmas" item and the Nativity item:

PRRI-1Contra the article, these variables are correlated: ignoring the don't knows and refusals, 57 percent of participants who believe that the gospel Nativity story is historically accurate preferred the "Merry Christmas" response ("No, should not"), but only 41 percent of participants who believe that the gospel Nativity story is a theological story preferred the "Merry Christmas" response.

Here is a logit regression using the gospel Nativity responses (gospel) to predict the Merry Christmas responses (merry), removing from the analysis the participants who were coded as don't know or refusal for at least one of the items:

PRRI-2The p-value for the logit regression is also p<0.001 in weighted analyses.

The gospel predictor still has a p-value under p=0.05 when including the demographic controls below in unweighted analyses and in weighted analyses:

PRRI-3The gospel predictor still has a p-value under p=0.05 when including the demographic controls and controls for GOP partisanship and self-reported ideology in unweighted analyses:

PRRI-4There are specifications in which the p-value for the gospel predictor is above p=0.05, such as in a weighted analysis including the above controls for demographics, partisanship, and ideology. But the gospel predictor not being robust to every possible specification, especially specifications that control for factors such as GOP partisanship and charitable giving that are plausibly influenced by religious belief, isn't the impression that I received from "...we found that there was no correlation between...believing in the biblical Nativity story...and rejecting 'Season's Greetings' for 'Merry Christmas'".

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Here is another passage from the article:

What does this tell us? Ultimately, drawing lines in the sand over whether people say "Merry Christmas" over "Happy Holidays" has virtually nothing to do with Christian faithfulness or orthodoxy.  It has everything to do with the cultural and political insecurity white conservatives feel.

I didn't see anything in the reported analysis that permits the inference that "It has everything to do with the cultural and political insecurity white conservatives feel". Whites and conservatives being more likely than non-Whites and non-conservatives to prefer "Merry Christmas" doesn't require that this preference is due to "the cultural and political insecurity white conservatives feel" any more than a non-White or non-conservative preference for "Happy Holidays" and "Seasons Greetings" can be attributed without additional information to the cultural and political insecurity that non-White non-conservatives feel.

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NOTES:

1. Code here. Data here. Data acknowledgment: PRRI Religion & Politics Tracking Poll, December 2013; Principal Investigators Robert P. Jones and Daniel Cox; Data were downloaded from the Association of Religion Data Archives, www.TheARDA.com [http://www.thearda.com/Archive/Files/Descriptions/PRRIRP1213.asp].

2. I had a Twitter discussion of the article and the data with co-author Samuel Perry, which can be accessed here.

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By Posted on Posted in Public opinion, Sex, Teaching No Comments

Here is a passage from Pigliucci 2013.

Steele and Aronson (1995), among others, looked at IQ tests and at ETS tests (e.g. SATs, GREs, etc.) to see whether human intellectual performance can be manipulated with simple psychological tricks priming negative stereotypes about a group that the subjects self-identify with. Notoriously, the trick worked, and as a result we can explain almost all of the gap between whites and blacks on intelligence tests as an artifact of stereotype threat, a previously unknown testing situation bias.

Racial gaps are a common and perennial concern in public education, but this passage suggests that such gaps are an artifact. However, when I looked up Steele and Aronson (1995) to discover the evidence for this result, I discovered that the black participants and the white participants in the study were all Stanford undergraduates and that the students' test performances were adjusted by the students' SAT scores. Given that the analysis contained both sample selection bias and statistical control, it does not seem reasonable to make an inference about populations based on that analysis. This error in reporting results for Steele and Aronson (1995) is apparently common enough to deserve its own article.

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Here's a related passage from Brian at Dynamic Ecology:

A neat example on the importance of nomination criteria for gender equity is buried in this post about winning Jeopardy (an American television quiz show). For a long time only 1/3 of the winners were women. This might lead Larry Summers to conclude men are just better at recalling facts (or clicking the button to answer faster). But a natural experiment (scroll down to the middle of the post to The Challenger Pool Has Gotten Bigger) shows that nomination criteria were the real problem. In 2006 Jeopardy changed how they selected the contestants. Before 2006 you had to self-fund a trip to Los Angeles to participate in try-outs to get on the show. This required a certain chutzpah/cockiness to lay out several hundred dollars with no guarantee of even being selected. And 2/3 of the winners were male because more males were making the choice to take this risk. Then they switched to an online test. And suddenly more participants were female and suddenly half the winners were female. [emphasis added]

I looked up the 538 post linked to in the passage, which reported: "Almost half of returning champions this season have been women. In the year before Jennings's streak, fewer than 1 in 3 winners were female." That passage provides two data points: this season appears to be 2015 (the year of the 538 post), and the year before Jennings's streak appears to be 2003 (the 538 post noted that Jennings's streak occurred in 2004). The 538 post reported that the rule change for the online test occurred in 2006.

So here's the relevant information from the 538 post:

  • In 2003, fewer than 1 in 3 Jeopardy winners were women.
  • In 2006, the selection process was changed to an online test.
  • Presumably in 2015, through early May, almost half of Jeopardy winners have been women.

It does not seem that comparison of a data point from 2003 to a partial data point from 2015 permits use of the descriptive term "suddenly."

It's entirely possible -- and perhaps probable -- that the switch to an online test for qualification reduced gender inequality in Jeopardy winners. But that inference needs more support than the minimal data reported in the 538 post.

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Here is Adam Davidson in the New York Times Magazine:

And yet the economic benefits of immigration may be the ­most ­settled fact in economics. A recent University of Chicago poll of leading economists could not find a single one who rejected the proposition.

For some reason, the New York Times online article did not link to that poll, so readers who do not trust the New York Times -- or readers who might be interested in characteristics of the poll, such as sample size, representativeness, and question wording -- must track down the poll themselves.

It appears that the poll cited by Adam Davidson is here and is limited to the aggregate effect of high-skilled immigrants:

The average US citizen would be better off if a larger number of highly educated foreign workers were legally allowed to immigrate to the US each year.

But concern about immigration is not limited to high-skilled immigrants and is not limited to the aggregate effect: a major concern is that low-skilled immigrants will have a negative effect on the poorest and most vulnerable Americans. There was a recent University of Chicago poll of leading economists on that concern, and that poll found more than a single economist to agree with that proposition; fifty percent, actually:

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Related: Here's what the New York Times did not mention about teacher grading bias

Related: Here's what the New York Times did not mention about the bus bias study

My comment at the New York Times summarizing this post, available after nine hours in moderation.

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Here is the title and abstract to my 2015 MPSA proposal:

A Troublesome Belief? Social Inequality and Belief in Human Biological Differences

In A Troublesome Inheritance, Nicholas Wade speculated that biological differences might help explain inequality of outcomes between human groups. Reviewers suggested that Wade's speculations might encourage xenophobia, so, to understand the possible attitudinal consequences of such a belief, I develop predictions based on the expectation that belief in a biological explanation for group-level social inequalities reduces the perceived need for policies to reduce these inequalities. General Social Survey data supported predictions that this belief is correlated with lower support for policies to reduce sexual inequalities, support for greater social distance between racial groups, more support for traditional sex roles, and less support for immigration, but did not indicate a correlation with aggregate support for policies to reduce racial inequalities. I further developed and tested predictions regarding the possibility that persons who perceive biological differences to have resulted from unguided processes such as Darwinian evolution adopt more progressive attitudes toward social inequalities than persons who perceive biological differences to have resulted from guided processes such as intelligent design.

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UPDATE (Nov 5, 2014)

The "Troublesome Belief" proposal was accepted for the MPSA public opinion panel, "Using public opinion to gauge democracy and the good life."

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UPDATE (Mar 10, 2015)

Draft of the manuscript for the MPSA presentation is here. Data are here. Code is here.

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UPDATE (Mar 23, 2015)

Updated draft of the manuscript for the MPSA presentation is here. Data are here. Code is here. Thanks to Emil Ole William Kirkegaard for helpful comments.

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UPDATE (Feb 13, 2016)

Updated draft of the manuscript is here.

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