Bad Science of the Day Ala Katrina 'Victims'

[Annie]

http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110008497

BY JAMES TARANTO
Friday, June 9, 2006 3:48 p.m. EDT

Liberals Are Racist, Study Suggests
The Washington Post's Richard Morin reports on a study he conducted, along with Shanto Iyengar of Stanford University, that attempted to gauge whether people's attitudes toward Hurricane Katrina victims were colored by racial prejudice.

Participants in the study were asked to read an article about a Katrina victim called "Terry Miller," who could be either male or female; black, white or Latino (in the last case, he was renamed "Terry Medina"); and, if black, either light- or dark-skinned. Then they were asked to say how much government aid victims of the hurricane should receive, within a range of $200 to $1,200 a month and three to 18 months:

If race mattered, there would be a difference in the level of assistance favored by respondents who read an article about the white Terry Miller and the assistance favored by those who read about a black Terry Miller.

There was. People were willing to give assistance to a white victim, on average, for about 12 months. But for an African American victim, the average duration was a month shorter while the amount of aid was nearly the same, meaning that blacks would collect about $1,000 less than white victims.
​

Roger Clegg, on National Review Online, argues that they take a glass-is-half-empty approach:

There could have been as much as a 15-month difference, and there was only a 1-month difference; there could have been as much as a $1000-a-month difference, and there was only, at most, a $100-a-month difference. Doesn't sound like proof of a racist society to me.
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We are skeptical of the entire enterprise of trying to measure something as intangible as racial attitudes. Clegg's criticism (with which we neither agree nor disagree) illustrates one reason why: Even if you assume that these numbers are meaningful, how much of a difference would constitute "proof of a racist society"? We can't think of an answer to the question that isn't entirely arbitrary.

Even if we assume that the disparities Morin and Iyengar find actually do mean what they think they do, there is an enormous systemic bias in their study, which they acknowledge, seemingly without grasping its significance, in their full write-up:

Approximately 2,300 people completed the experiment. As in our past studies, the sample was skewed heavily in the direction of Democrats and liberals--only 12 percent of the participants identified as Republican. Eighty-six percent were critical of President Bush's handling of Katrina. The sample was also highly educated--84% had completed at least a bachelor's degree. These features of the sample are especially important in light of the results we describe below.
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Later they note that 86% of the survey participants were white. They don't say how the participants were chosen, but it's clear that they are not a representative sample of the U.S. population: They are whiter, much better educated, and much more liberal than the population as a whole.

In other words, if this study shows that the participants are racially biased, that doesn't prove that Americans are racially biased. At most it proves that well-educated liberal white Americans are. Morin and Iyengar seem to think that their study's skew in favor of WELWAs strengthens their argument:

People cannot help stereotyping on the basis of ethnicity despite their best efforts to act unbiased and egalitarian. As we noted at the outset, this particular sample of participants consisted of highly educated individuals who located themselves toward the liberal end of the political spectrum. Many of them live in and around the nation's capital, one of the more racially diverse and cosmopolitan areas of America. We suspect that this group would score at or very near the top of most measures of support for civil rights and racial equality. Yet their responses to Katrina were influenced by the mere inclusion of racial cues in news media coverage. The fact that this group awarded lower levels of hurricane assistance after reading about looting or after encountering an African-American family displaced by the hurricane is testimony to the persistent and primordial power of racial imagery in American life.​

That is to say, their claim to have uncovered empirical evidence of racial bias throughout "American life" is based on the assumption that WELWAs are less biased than the population as a whole, or at least that they are not appreciably more biased. But it is quite plausible that WELWAs are more biased, especially having gone through a higher education system that places great emphasis on racial differences.

A real social scientist would test such assumptions rather than merely assert that they prove his conclusion. The study's most definitive finding, then, is that its authors are prejudiced against Americans who are not liberal and those who lack college degrees.

 

[PsuedoGhost]

http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110008497

Or we could just say that we should disregard the findings of the study, since it was obviously not conducted in a scientifically valid manner... I mean whichever floats your boat.

 

[William Joyce]

Neocons like Clegg and Taranto want to deny that whites, whether conservative or liberal, ARE racist.

So what? Can we talk about whether racism is valid? Fact is that people DO empathize more with co-ethnics.

So what? Is a mother "racist" because she favors her child over yours?

No. She's a good mother.

Conservatives today are so whipped on the race issue that they spend all their time trying to prove how "non-racist" they are.

 

[Gunny]

http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110008497

This dude writes for the Washington Post? Gues he'll be collecting unemployment next week.