Contagious Animosity in the Field: Evidence from the Federal Criminal Justice System

Abstract

A vast literature uses ingroup biases to explain animus towards others. The notion can be extended to multi-identity societies, where social preferences are de…ned over one ingroup and multiple outgroups. We use a novel research design to recover the structure of social preferences across outgroups in a high stakes setting. We investigate whether increased animosity towards Muslims post 9-11 had spillover e¤ects on Black and Hispanic individuals in the federal criminal justice system. Using linked administrative data tracking defendants from arrest through to sentencing, we …nd that as 9-11 increased animosity towards Muslims, sentence and pre-sentence outcomes for Hispanic defendants signi…cantly worsened. Outcomes for Black defendants were unchanged. We underpin a causal interpretation of our …ndings by providing evidence to support the identifying assumptions underlying the research design. The …ndings are consistent with judges and prosecutors displaying social preferences characterized by contagious animosity from Muslims to Hispanics. To understand why increased animosity towards Muslims post 9-11 could spillover onto Hispanics, we draw on work in sociology to detail how Islamophobia and immigration have become intertwined in American consciousness since the mid 1990s, but were forcefully framed together in the aftermath of 9-11. We narrow the interpretation of the results as being driven by social preference structures using decomposition analysis, and correlating sentencing di¤erentials to judge characteristics, including their race/ethnicity. Our …ndings provide among the …rst …eld evidence of contagious animosity, so that social preferences across outgroups are interlinked and malleable.

The Covid-19 Pandemic and Asian American Employment

“…This is outside the scope of our work in this paper. Such an explanation would be consistent withRasul and McConnell (2020) andSakong (2018).…”

Racial Sentencing Disparities and Differential Progression Through the Criminal Justice System: Evidence From Linked Federal and State Court Data

“…19 The conditional gap that I document is larger than other papers in the literature. For instance, using a sample that is a subset of the one used here, McConnell and Rasul (2021) document an unconditional Blackwhite sentencing gap of a similar magnitude, but a conditional sentencing gap that is smaller by a factor of 3.…”

The EU Referendum and Experiences and Fear of Ethnic and Racial Harassment: Variation Across Individuals and Communities in England

“…Moreover, there is some evidence that negative press coverage of some out-groups, in this case EU immigrants, can also "spillover" into greater hostility toward other minorities. For example, US researchers have demonstrated that negative media portrayals linking Islamophobia and immigration following the 9/11 attacks (Romero and Zarrugh, 2018) resulted in longer prison sentences for minority group members perceived as immigrants (Rasul and McConnell, 2020). Analysis of a recent survey of mental health among migrants of all origins in the UK demonstrate how an increase in minority stress and social stigma, mediated via increased experiences of discrimination following the Referendum, resulted in worse mental health for both EU and non-EU migrants (Frost, 2020).…”

“…There is also substantial evidence that media coverage of politicized events can heighten out-group hostility (Adena et al, 2015), reinforcing existing prejudices and even creating new ones (Gavin, 2018). The heightened salience of outgroup membership and increased hostility toward outgroup members which arises from significant events such as the September 11 terrorist attacks or the Trump campaign has further been shown to increase the prevalence of hate speech (Newman et al, 2020), actual acts of hate crime (Frey, 2020) and discriminatory practices toward ethnic minorities (Rasul and McConnell, 2020).…”