L.J Zigerell

Andrew Gelman linked to a story (see also here) about a Science article by Annie Franco, Neil Malhotra, and Gabor Simonovits on the file drawer problem in the Time Sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences. TESS fields social science survey experiments, and sometimes the results of these experiments are not published.

I have been writing up some of these unpublished results but haven't submitted anything yet. Neil Malhotra was kind enough to indicate that I'm not stepping on their toes, so I'll post what I have so far for comment. From what I have been able to determine, none of these studies discussed below were published, but let me know if I am incorrect about that. I'll try to post a more detailed write-up of these results soon, but in the meantime feel free to contact me for details on the analyses.

I've been concentrating on bias studies, because I figure that it's important to know if there is little-to-no evidence of bias in a large-scale nationally-representative sample; not that such a study proves that there's no bias, but reporting these studies helps to provide a better estimate for the magnitude of bias. It's also important to report evidence of bias in unexpected directions.

TESS 241

TESS study 241, based on a proposal from Stephen W. Benard, tested for race and sex bias in worker productivity ratings. Respondents received a vignette about the work behavior of a lawyer whose name was manipulated in the experimental conditions to signal the lawyer's sex and race: Kareem (black male), Brad (white male), Tamika (black female), and Kristen (white female). Respondents were asked how productive the lawyer was, how valuable the lawyer was, how hardworking the lawyer was, how competent the lawyer was, whether the lawyer deserved a raise, how respected the lawyer was, how honorable the lawyer was, how prestigious the lawyer was, how capable the lawyer was, how intelligent the lawyer was, and how knowledgeable the lawyer was.

Substantive responses to these eleven items were used to create a rating scale, with items standardized before summing and cases retained if there were substantive responses for at least three items; this scale had a Cronbach's alpha of 0.92. The scale was standardized so that its mean and standard deviation were respectively 0 and 1; higher values on the scale indicate more favorable evaluations.

Here is a chart of the main results, with experimental targets on the left side:

The bias in this study is against Brad relative to Kareem, Kristen, and Tamika.

TESS 392

TESS study 392, based on a proposal from Lisa Rashotte and Murray Webster, tested for bias based on sex and age. Respondents were randomly assigned to receive a picture and text description of one of four target persons: Diane Williams, a 21-year-old woman; David Williams, a 21-year-old man; Diane Williams, a 45-year-old woman; and David Williams, a 45-year-old man. Respondents were asked to rate the target person on nine traits, drawn from Webster and Driskell (1983): intelligence, ability in situations in general, ability in things that the respondent thinks counts, capability at most tasks, reading ability, abstract abilities, high school grade point average, how well the person probably did on the Federal Aviation Administration exam for a private pilot license, and physical attractiveness. For the tenth item, respondents were shown their ratings for the previous nine items and given an opportunity to change their ratings.

The physical attractiveness item was used as a control variable in the analysis. Substantive responses to the other eight items were used to create a rating scale, with items standardized before summing and cases retained if the case had substantive responses for at least five items; this scale had a Cronbach's alpha of 0.91. The scale was standardized so that its mean and standard deviation were respectively 0 and 1; higher values on the scale indicate more favorable evaluations.

Here is a chart of the main results, with experimental targets on the left side:

The figure indicates point estimates and 95% confidence intervals for the mean level of evaluations in experimental conditions for all respondents and disaggregated groups; data were weighted. The bias in this study, among women, is in favor of older persons and, among men, is in favor of the older woman. Here's a table of 95% confidence intervals for mean rating differences for each comparison:

TESS 012

TESS study 012, based on a proposal from Emily Shafer, tested for bias for or against married women based on the women's choice of last name after marriage. The study's six conditions manipulated a married woman's last name and the commitment that caused the woman to increase the burden on others. Conditions 1 and 4, 2 and 5, and 3 and 6 respectively reflected the woman keeping her last name, hyphenating her last name, or adopting her husband's last name; the vignette for conditions 1, 2, and 3 indicated that the woman's co-workers were burdened because of the woman's marital commitment, and the vignette for conditions 4, 5, and 6 indicated that the woman's husband was burdened because of the woman's work commitment.

Substantive responses to items 1, 2, 5A, and 6A were used to create an "employee evaluation" scale, with items standardized before summing and cases retained if there were substantive responses for at least three items; this scale had a Cronbach's alpha of 0.73. Substantive responses to items 3, 4, 5B, and 6B were used to create a "wife evaluation" scale, with items standardized before summing and cases retained if there were substantive responses for at least three items; this scale had a Cronbach's alpha of 0.74. Both scales were standardized so that their mean and standard deviation were respectively 0 and 1 and then reversed so that higher scores indicated a more positive evaluation.

Results are presented for the entire sample, for men, for women, for persons who indicated that they were currently married or once married and used traditional last name patterns (traditional respondents), and for persons who indicated that they were currently married or once married but did not use traditional last name patterns (non-traditional respondents); name patterns were considered traditional for female respondents who changed their last name to their spouse's last name (with no last name change by the spouse), and male respondents whose spouse changed their last name (with no respondent last name change).

Here is a chart of the main results, with experimental conditions on the left side:

The figure displays point estimates and 95% confidence intervals for weighted mean ratings for each condition, adjusted for physical attractiveness. Not much bias detected here, except for men's wife evaluations when the target woman kept her last name.

TESS 714

TESS study 714, based on a proposal from Kimberly Rios Morrison, tested whether asking whites to report their race as white had a different effect on multiculturalism attitudes and prejudice than asking whites to report their ethnicity as European American. See here for published research on this topic.

Respondents were randomly assigned to one of three groups: respondents in the European American prime group were asked to identify their race/ethnicity as European American, American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian American or Pacific Islander, Black or African American, Hispanic/Latino, or Other; respondents in the White prime group were asked to identify their race/ethnicity from the same list but with European American replaced with White; and respondents in the control group were not asked to identify their race/ethnicity.

Respondents were shown 15 items regarding ethnic minorities, divided into four sections that we'll call support for multiculturalism, support for pro-ethnic policies, resentment of ethnic minorities, and closeness to whites. Scales were made for items from the first three sections; to create a "closeness to whites" scale, responses to the item on closeness to ethnic minorities were subtracted from responses to the item on closeness to nonminorities, to indicate degree of closeness to whites; this item was then standardized.

Here is a chart of the main results, with experimental conditions on the left side:

The figure displays weighted point estimates and 95% confidence intervals. The prime did not have much influence, except for the bottom right graph.

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There's a LOT of interesting things in the TESS archives. Comparing reported results to my own analyses of the data (not for the above studies, but for other studies) has illustrated the inferential variation that researcher degrees of freedom can foster.

One of the ways to assess claims of liberal bias in social science is to comb through data such as the TESS archives, which let us see what a sample of researchers are interested in and what a sample of researchers place into their file drawer. Researchers placing null results into a file drawer is ambiguous because we cannot be sure whether placement in the file drawer is due to the null results or to the political valence of the null results; however, researchers placing statistically significant results into a file drawer has much less ambiguity.

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UPDATE (Sept 6, 2014)

Gábor Simonovits, one of the co-authors of the Science article, quickly and kindly sent me a Stata file of their dataset; that data and personal communication with Stephen W. Benard indicated that results from none of the four studies reported in this post have been published.

I have posted a working manuscript on symbolic racism here, with its appendix here. Comments are welcome and appreciated. I'll outline the manuscript below and give some background to the research.

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On 27 October 2012, a Facebook friend posted a link to an Associated Press report "AP poll: Majority harbor prejudice against blacks." I posted this comment about the report:

During the Facebook discussion, I noted that it not obvious that the implicit measurements indicate racism, given the data on implicit preferences among blacks:

Bob Somersby at the Daily Howler noticed that the AP report provided data disaggregated by political party but failed to provide data disaggregated by race:

Although Ross and Agiesta were eager to tell you how many Democrats, Republicans and independents were shown to hold "anti-black feelings," they never tell you how many black respondents “hold anti-black feelings” as well!

Why didn't our intrepid reporters give us that information? We can't answer that question. But even a mildly skeptical observer could imagine one possible answer:

If substantial percentages of black respondents were allegedly shown to "hold anti-black feelings," that would make almost anyone wonder how valid the AP's measures may be. It would undermine confidence in the professors—in those men of vast erudition, the orange-shoed fellows who still seem to think that Obama trailed in the national polling all through the summer of 2008.

David Moore at iMediaEthics posted data disaggregated by race that he retrieved from the lead author of the study: based on the same method used in the original report, 30 percent of white Americans implicitly held anti-white sentiments, and 43 percent of black Americans implicitly held anti-black sentiments. Moore discussed how this previously-unreported information alters interpretation of the study's findings:

It appears that racism, as measured by this process, is much more complicated than the news story would suggest. We cannot talk about the 56% of Americans with "anti-black" attitudes as being "racist," if we do not also admit that close to half of all blacks are also "racist" – against their own race.

If we accept the measures of anti-black attitudes as a valid indicator of racism, then we also have to accept the anti-white measures as racism.

Moore did not tell us the results for black respondents on the explicit measures of racism, so that's the impetus behind Study 2 of the working manuscript.

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The explicit racism measure discussed in the AP report is symbolic racism, also known as racial resentment. Instead of explaining what symbolic racism is, I'll show how symbolic racism is typically measured; items below are from the American National Election Studies, but there were more items in the study discussed in the AP report.

Symbolic racism is measured in the ANES based on whether a survey respondent agrees strongly, agrees somewhat, neither agrees nor disagrees, disagrees somewhat, or disagrees strongly with these four items:

1. Irish, Italians, Jewish and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without any special favors.

2. Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class.

3. Over the past few years, blacks have gotten less than they deserve.

4. It's really a matter of some people not trying hard enough; if blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites.

I hope that you can see why these are not really measures of explicit racism. Let's say that non-racist person A opposes special favors for all groups: that person would select the symbolic racist option for item 1, indicating a belief that blacks should work their way up without special favors. Person A is coded the same as a person B who opposes special favors for blacks because of person B's racism. So that's problem #1 with symbolic racism measures: the measures conflate racial attitudes and non-racial beliefs.

But notice that there is another problem. Let's say that person C underestimates the influence of slavery and discrimination on outcomes for contemporary blacks; person C will select a symbolic racism option for item 2, but is that racism? is that racial animosity? is that a reflection that a non-black person -- and even some black persons -- might not appreciate the legacy of slavery and discrimination? or is that something else? That's problem #2 with symbolic racism measures: it's not obvious how to interpret these measures.

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Researchers typically address problem 1 with control variables; the hope is that placing partisanship, self-reported ideology, and a few conservative values items into a regression sufficiently dilutes the non-racial component of symbolic racism so that the effect of symbolic racism can be interpreted as its racial component only.

In the first part of the working manuscript, I test this hope by predicting non-racial dependent variables, such as opposition to gay marriage. The idea of this test is that -- if statistical control really does sufficiently dilute the non-racial component of symbolic racism -- then symbolic racism should not correlate with opposition to gay marriage, because racism should not be expected to correlate with opposition to gay marriage; but -- if there is a correlation between symbolic racism and gay marriage -- then statistical control did not sufficiently dilute the non-racial component of symbolic racism.

The results indicate that a small set of controls often does not sufficiently dilute the non-racial component of symbolic racism, so results from symbolic racism research with a small set of controls should be treated skeptically. But a more extensive set of controls often does sufficiently dilute the non-racial component of symbolic racism, so we can place more -- but not complete -- confidence in results from symbolic racism research with an extensive set of controls.

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The way that I addressed problem #2 -- about how to interpret symbolic racism measures -- is to assess the effect of symbolic racism among black respondents. Results indicate that among blacks -- and even among a set of black respondents with quite positive views of their own racial group -- symbolic racism sometimes positively correlates with opposition to policies to help blacks.

Study 2 suggests that it is not legitimate for researchers to interpret symbolic racism among whites differently than symbolic racism among blacks, without some other information that can permit us to state that symbolic racism means something different for blacks and whites. Study 3 assesses whether there is evidence that symbolic racism means something different for blacks and whites.

Author: L.J Zigerell

Four TESS studies

The discriminant validity of symbolic racism