If there’s any disproportion, it’s in how often the death penalty is levied relative to the race of the victim. Which may very well be a result of racism, but may alternately be a consequence of African-Americans being hostile to the death penalty, and comprising most of the jury pool in areas where most of the black on black murders are taking place. It could be challenging to disentangle these effects, as it would require a detailed inquiry into all the circumstances surrounding each of the cases.

First the authors’s are very anti-death penalty and have an agenda (they even bring up WMD in Iraq, huh?!) and are not genuniely looking for confounding factors.

They even go so far as to offer sneaky coaching to death penalty opponents:
Thus, making more general arguments against the lack of fairness of the death penalty without making a direct reference to race may constitute a successful “stealth” strategy that appeals to
blacks but does not produce countermobilization among whites.

The clue to me that something is wrong is the table on p 7. First the “baseline” question only has N=117, not 200 has has been reported. Secondly the “Strongly Oppose” category actually goes down from 18% to 11.4% when they introduce the race information.

Based on the people you personally know who oppose the death penalty (strongly), do you think any of them would likely be swayed by the race of the offender? I am incredulous to the point where I think these too sample populations are different.

I also find it interesting (and troublesome) that they actual question is varied too. “The experiment also randomly manipulated the source of the argument as either “some people” or “FBI statistics show that,” which had
no discernible influence on support for the death penalty. p7” It seems to me that there is a big difference between saying that “some people say” and “law enforcement says that they are executing a lot of innocent people”. The authors tell us there is no significance, but it would have been much better if the numbers were broken out or the question stayed the same.

Sorry, no idea. I was curious about eudoxis’ question so I dug up the linked site, but that’s all the research I’ve done on this.

“Some people say that being poor affects dispoportionately African-Americans. Do you favor or oppose policies that would help the poor?”

Apparently not. While African-Americans have been disproportionately represented among the executed, whites have been a numerical majority.

Is this true?

Step to the innocent framing. Here I suspect that most people would accept the linkage, but they don’t accept the ‘some’ as being a statistically significant number which should change the argument. ‘Some’ people get struck by lightening, but we don’t worry about it much. This may be an incorrect view of the underlying factual issue, but I suspect it is the actual view.

Back to the original questions, I suspect that a few people don’t accept the facts, but that most people don’t accept the linkage. So while not as strongly as the alien ghosts example, they are still predisposed to reject the later proposition.

Note that the hardening of positions comes across at all levels. The number who strongly support the death penalty goes up, and the number who somewhat support it remains essentially steady. Unless people are jumping from “undecided” straight to “strongly support”, this is a hardening of position across levels.

Interestingly enough, this same shift is observed even among those who oppose the death penalty. The number who strongly oppose and who somewhat oppose drops noticeably in response to the racially charged question. This is an interesting result (though it also makes me wonder if the ‘other randomly selected group of white people’ was just straight up not as opposed to the death penalty). There are all sorts of potential explanations for that (racism, the framing I’ve discussed, drawing an odd group) but the result of the hardening in the anti-death penalty group is worth thinking about more.

Also we can look at the black respondents in the same analysis. I would suspect that they are much more likely to accept the validity of the fact presented and the linkage between the fact and the later question. Another very interesting result is that the black respondents react even more negatively to the innocent framing than the racial framing. I suspect that this result is because they strongly accept the linkage between the factoid and the later question in the innocent framing.

Anyway, no conclusions from me on the topic. I’m perfectly willing to accept, sadly, that many of those who seem to have a stronger position on the topic, really are racist. But on the other hand I hate when the interpretation intended by the interviewer is taken as gospel—the effect of people getting in a habit of disagreeing or agreeing in a particular interview really does exist.

Similar anecdotal results can be found in the 1990 gubernatorial election in Louisiana, in which David Duke, the photogenic Klansman, got the majority of white votes against Edwin Edwards. One incidental effect of that close call may have been the Republican Party softening its opposition to reform of civil rights laws, which gave us the Civil Rights Act of 1991. And the campaign also gave us a bumper sticker produced by Edwards supporters that has to be the gold standard for candor and incisiveness: “Vote For The Crook—It’s Important!”

I don’t think that’s a strong counterexample. After all, that may have been the implicit justification for the anti-death penalty respondents in the simplest formulation. Any framing of the question which brings up an argument that seems less irrelevant could make its case seem weaker.

Remember, most people (probably including you; certainly including me) are pretty bad at evaluating arguments fairly and ignoring irrelevancies.

You really are intellectually dishonest.

Sk