Black and White discrimination in the United States: Evidence from an archive of survey experiment studies

Abstract

This study reports results from a new analysis of 17 survey experiment studies that permitted assessment of racial discrimination, drawn from the archives of the Time-sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences. For White participants (n=10 435), pooled results did not detect a net discrimination for or against White targets, but, for Black participants (n=2781), pooled results indicated the presence of a small-to-moderate net discrimination in favor of Black targets; inferences were the same for the subset of studies that had a political candidate target and the subset of studies that had a worker or job applicant target. These results have implications for understanding racial discrimination in the United States, and, given that some of the studies have never been fully reported on in a journal or academic book, the results also suggest the need for preregistration to reduce or eliminate publication bias in racial discrimination studies.

Is discrimination widespread? Testing assumptions about bias on a university campus.

“…Alternatively, it could be that our results generalize only to similar environments: those where most people hold strong egalitarian attitudes, where motivation to be nonprejudiced is high, and where there are strong institutional injunctive norms to be inclusive. Contextual factors like these could have led to the failure to detect discrimination in recent studies, discussed earlier (Boutwell et al, 2017; Forscher, Cox, et al, 2019; Thebault-Spieker et al, 2017; Zigerell, 2018). These studies indirectly suggest that there may be several contexts where the discrimination that individuals from marginalized groups experience is poorly described by the dispersed discrimination account.…”

“…The same pattern of results was found in a study examining ratings of gig economy workers (Thebault-Spieker et al, 2017). Working with large survey data sets of more than 10,000 participants each, both Zigerell (2018) and Boutwell and colleagues (2017) found little to no evidence that members of marginalized groups experienced widespread discrimination. At the very least, these findings suggest there is some variability in when and how discrimination is expressed in modern society.…”

It’s security, stupid! Voters’ perceptions of immigrants as a security risk predicted support for Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election

“…By one estimate, only 2.5% of Blacks report experiencing discrimination often and as a result of their race (Boutwell et al, ). Even while White liberals have perceived more discrimination between 2009 and 2016, discrimination has actually declined during this period (Goldberg, ), and some evidence suggests that while Blacks tend to show discrimination in favor of the ingroup, Whites do not (Zigerell, ). Rather than measuring racism, agreement with items reflected in this scale more accurately reflect closer approximations to reality—that racism is rare and isolated, rather than ubiquitous and pervasive.…”

A Model of Political Bias in Social Science Research

“…However, we know of at least 17 cases of suppression uncovered that are consistent with Clark and Winegard's analysis of how the second equalitarian assumption (prejudice and discrimination are ubiquitous) can bias the scientific literature. Zigerell (2018) discovered 17 unpublished experiments on racial bias embedded in nationally representative surveys totaling over 13,000 respondents. These unpublished experiments failed to detect evidence of anti-black bias among white respondents but did detect pro-black bias among black respondents.…”

“…However, this explanation is, at best, incomplete, inasmuch as statistically significant evidence of anti-white bias among black respondents was found and the studies still were not published. Second, regardless of the reasons for suppression, the mere fact that these findings were suppressed means that the scientific literature was biased in an equalitarian direction (overstating the extent of racial bias by its failure to include these 17 studies finding no bias among whites) until Zigerell's (2018) forensic work rediscovered these studies.…”