With the election coming up in two
weeks, voter ID laws are back in the news. The Supreme Court has accepted or rejected state voter suppression laws in a seemingly
random pattern, without explaining their rationale. In news stories
about voter ID, the corporate media typically demonstrate false balancing. They fail to examine Republican claims that voter
impersonation is a problem. (It is not.) They report but don't
evaluate the Democrats' argument that voter ID laws suppress turnout
among key Democratic constituencies, such as the poor, minorities,
and college students. (There is evidence to support this claim.)
While the media sometimes imply that these laws are politically
motivated, new evidence suggests that they may also be motivated by
racial prejudice. These studies confirm every bad thing you
suspected about voter ID laws.
In a new study, David Wilson and his colleagues at the University of Delaware's Center for Political
Communication (CPC) used cognitive priming to test the
prejudice hypothesis. Their experiment was embedded in the 2012
Cooperative Congressional Election Survey, managed by computer by
YouGov/Polimetrix. They had 1436 US adult respondents, 1100 of whom
were White. The White participants were randomly assigned to one of
three versions of a question asking them whether they favor or oppose
voter ID laws. For one-third of the respondents, the question was
accompanied by a photo of a White voter and poll worker. For another
third, the voter and poll worker were African-American. The
remainder of the participants were not shown any image. The photos
and the wording of the question are shown in the results table below.
Support for voter ID laws was quite
high. Most importantly, when given the Black prime, a reminder of
the fact that African-Americans vote, the White respondents were more
in favor of voter ID laws than when given the White prime or no prime
at all. The fact that the race of the prime was manipulated in a
true experiment suggests that race plays a causal role in attitudes
toward voter ID.
These results are consistent with an earlier correlational study by Wilson and Brewer. This was a 2012
telephone survey of 906 adult Americans conducted by the CPC.
Particpants were asked their party affiliation (Democrat, Republican
or Independent) and their political ideology (liberal, moderate or
conservative). White respondents were also given a three item measure of racial resentment similar to the Symbolic Racism Scale:
I resent any special
considerations that African Americans receive because it's unfair to
other Americans.
Special considerations for African
Americans place me at an unfair disadvantage because I have done
nothing to harm them.
African Americans bring up race
only when they need to make an excuse for their failure.
As indicated in the chart, Republicans
and conservatives supported voter ID laws more than Democrats and
liberals. There was also a significant correlation between racial
resentment and support for voter ID. Racial
resentment was higher among Republicans and conservatives than
Democrats and liberals, with Independents and moderates in the
middle. However, racial resentment still had a significant effect on
attitudes toward voter ID laws even when controlling for political
partisanship, ideology and several other demographic variables.
Interestingly, racial resentment had a greater effect on the
attitudes of Democrats and liberals, since Republicans and
conservatives overwhelmingly support voter ID laws regardless of how
much racial resentment they express.
Of course, public opinion does not
automatically translate in social policy. Please see Part 2 of this
post.
There are a number of reasons social
psychologists are confident that the availability of firearms is a
major cause of violent death. In an earlier post, I discussed some
of the many studies of the priming effect of weapons on aggression.
These studies suggest that the presence of weapons, or pictures of
weapons, increases aggressive thoughts and behaviors. Since these
are laboratory experiments in which participants are randomly
assigned to conditions, they permit a relatively strong inference of
causality. However, due to the obvious constraints on our
willingness to provoke aggression in the lab, some people find these
studies to be artificial, and feel more comfortable with field
studies of the availability of firearms in the real world.
Many of these field studies are
ecological, in the sense that they measure both the
availability of weapons and the number of deaths at the aggregate or
population level. For example, in an early study, Archer and Gartner (1987) found that the homicide rate in countries around the world is
highly correlated with the availability of handguns. But correlation does not mean causation, and the countries involved in this
comparison differed in many other ways besides their weapons policy.
Most recent studies have attempted to statistically control for alternative explanations such as urbanization, poverty, alcohol use,
depression, etc. However, since the number of alternative
explanations is theoretically infinite, there are limits to this
approach.
Gun advocates also attack the validity of the measures used in these studies. For example, in most studies,
the availability of firearms is determined from gun registration
statistics. However, it could be argued that many homicides are the
result of unregistered guns in the hands of criminals. Can this
assumption account for the positive correlation between gun
availaility and murder? Yes, but only if you assume that those areas
that contain the most legally registered guns also contain the most
illegal ones.
A more time-consuming but more conservative procedure is to start with a suicide or homicide and
work backward, looking at each individual case. In these
observational studies, for each suicide or homicide victim,
regardless of the manner of death, it is determined whether firearms
were available in the home. These people are compared to a matched
control group of people who did not commit suicide or were not
murdered, such as participants in a national health survey. This
allows you to compute a likelihood ratio—the likelihood of a
homicide or suicide when a gun is available compared to the
likelihood when it is not.
In a study published this week, Andrew
Anglemyer of the University of California at San Francisco and his
colleagues did a thorough literature search and located 15 such
observational studies. They then did a meta-analysis of these
data. A meta-analysis is an analysis of analyses, a way of
statistically combining the results of several studies to estimate
the size of an effect. These were their findings:
You are 3.24 times more likely to
commit suicide when a firearm is readily available than when it is
not. These findings do not differ for men and women.
You are 1.94 times more likely to
die of a homicide with a gun in the home than without. This effect
differs for male and female homicide victims. Women are 2.94 times
more likely to be killed when a firearm is available, while for men,
the effect is almost nil—only 1.29 times more likely.
The meta-analysis shows that having a
firearm available has a greater influence on suicides than on
homicides. This makes sense, because most firearm suicides kill
themselves with their own gun, while most firearm homicide victims
are killed with someone else's gun.
The homicide data show that firearm
availability only increases the risk for female victims. Other studies show that women are most likely to be murdered by someone
they know. This suggests that firearm availability makes it easier
for domestic violence to become lethal. On the other hand, there is
no evidence that owning a firearm increases the risk of homicide for
men, since they are usually not killed with a gun belonging to themselves or a
family member.
In an accompanying editorial, David Hemenway, a leading authority on firearm victimization, points out
that this pattern of results is due to Anglemyer's choice to analyze
only individual-level, observational studies. He argues that the
meta-analysis substantially underestimates the effects of firearm
availability on male homicides because it only asks whether the
victim had access to a gun, when the more important question is whether
the perpetrator had access to a gun. Therefore, he suggests that future studies of homicides be either population-level ecological
studies which measure the number of guns in the community, or
individual-level observational studies of the availability of
firearms to perpetrators rather than victims.
It's always good for a laugh. Some
prominent homophobe, usually from the fields of government or
religion, is caught soliciting or having sex with another man.
Homophobia is serious, however, sometimes leading to murder and other
hate crimes. A new series of four studies by Netta Weistein and five colleagues, conducted in the U. S. and Germany, appears to confirm
what gay rights advocates have long suspected—that homophobes and
anti-gay activists are secretly attracted to the same sex. This
study is gated, but you can get a lot of information about it here.
To present this study, I need to talk
about subliminal priming. First of all, priming refers to the
process by which a recent experience increases the availability of a
concept. For example, if you had recently seen or heard the word
“eat” and I asked you to fill in the blank in “S O _ P,”
you'd be likely to say the word “soup.” But if you had recently
seen the word “wash,” you'd fill in “soap.” Subliminal means
below the level of conscious awareness. Priming can occur
subliminally as well as consciously. For example, if I showed you a
picture on a computer screen for 4/1000 of a second, you'd see a
flash of light and be unable to identify the object in the photo.
But it might influence your behavior. In one study, researchers subliminally primed photos of smiling or angry faces, followed by a
picture of a Chinese ideograph (or letter). Participants were asked
how much they liked each ideograph. Those ideographs primed with
happy faces were liked more than those with no prime, and those
primed with angry faces were liked less.
Priming can have socially important
consequences. Priming the concept of money causes people to work
harder on difficult tasks, but to be less helpful to other people and
donate less to charity. In 2008, when white students from Florida
were shown a subliminal prime of a confederate flag, they indicated
they were less likely to vote for Barack Obama (but not any other
candidates).
The studies by Weinstein and her
colleagues attempted to measure whether people experienced conflict
between their implicit and explicit sexual orientation. The measure
of implicit sexual orientation—the tricky part—involved
subliminal priming. Subjects were shown slides of four words (“gay,”
“straight,” “homosexual” and “heterosexual”) and of
same-sexed or opposite-sexed couples. They were asked to classify
each word or image as either gay or straight as quickly as possible.
Before each trial, they were subliminally primed with either the word
“me” or “others.” Those participants who showed more rapid
identification of gay stimuli when they were preceded by the word
“me” than by “others” (and a slower identification of
straight stimuli when preceded by “me” than by “others”) were
assumed to have an implicit attraction to the same sex. Participants
were also asked their sexual orientation, and the measure of interest
was the discrepancy between their implicit and explicit sexual
orientation.
If you're troubled by this measure of
implicit sexual orientation, one of the studies used a more face
valid measure of implicit attraction and obtained the same results.
In this measure, subjects were left alone and free to browse same-sex
and opposite-sex photos. It was assumed that differences in exposure
time would indicate their implicit sexual orientation.
The study looked at both the causes and
effects of a conflict between one's implicit and explicit sexual
orientation. The effect was predicted to be homophobia. Overt
homophobia was measured by questionnaires that looked at such things
as participants' self-reported attitudes toward gays, their attitudes toward
social policies affecting gay people, and the discriminatory bias of
assigning harsher punishments to gay people than straight people for
the same offense. Their measure of implicit hostility toward gays
also involved subliminal priming. Participants were either primed
with the word “gay” or not, and were asked to complete blanks
such as “K I _ _.” Filling in more aggressive words such as
“kick” after the gay prime was taken as an indicator of covert
hostility to gays. Both the overt and covert measures showed greater
homophobia among the sexually conflicted participants.
This finding supports one of Sigmund
Freud's unconscious defense mechanisms against anxiety, reaction formation. In reaction formation, people experience anxiety caused
by an unconscious desire to engage in some behavior that is
unacceptable to them, such as having gay sex. They defend against
this anxiety by engaging in exaggerated behaviors that imply just the
opposite of their unconscious feelings, such as becoming an anti-gay crusader.
These researchers were interested in
the child rearing practicies that produced conflicts between implicit
and explicit sexual orientation. The studies tested a proposition
from Deci and Ryan's self-determination theory which asserts that
controlling parents will produce children who are less in touch with
their feelings than than parents who encourage autonomy. This is
similar to the distinction between authoritarian vs. democratic
child-rearing. Participants were asked questions about their family
such as “I felt controlled and pressured in certain ways,” or “I
felt free to be who I am.” Those participants who reported coming
from authoritarian families were more likely to experience conflict
in their sexual orientation.
The researchers also asked participants
about their parents' homophobia. Homophobic fathers (but not mothers)
were most likely to produce young adults with this discrepancy in
their sexual orientation. Here's a video explaining the studies by
one of the authors, Richard Ryan.
What are we to make of these studies?
They are heavily dependent on questionnaire measures, which are
subject to distortion when dealing with sensitive subjects. I'm
particularly skeptical of college students' reports of their parents'
child-rearing practices. I'm more impressed with the subliminal
priming measures, both of implicit same-sex attraction and covert
hostility to gay people. If subsequent studies find a consistent
association between these two measures, we may have to acknowledge
that Freud got something right.
There is another study by Henry Adams
and others that supports the association of male same-sex attraction
with homophobia. The participants were college men who were
previously classified as high or low in homophobia by their answers
to questions such as “I would feel nervous being in a group of
homosexuals.” Subjects then watched three types of hard core
pornography: heterosexual, gay male and gay female. Sexual arousal
was measured using a plethysmograph, a rubber strain guage which fits
tightly around the penis and measures its circumference. (Isn't
research fun?) Both the groups high and low in homophobia showed
increases in arousal to the heterosexual and lesbian videos, but only
the homophobes were also aroused by the gay male videos.
Last week, in connection of the
shooting death of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, I posted research showing that people are more likely to “see” a gun in
the hands of a African-American man than a white man, even when that
black man is carrying a harmless object such as a cell phone. Now I've found a new
series of studies that suggest that
carrying a gun also increases the likelihood that you will see a
similar weapon in the hands of others.
Photo by itwuzcryptic
In a soon-to-be-published paper,
Jessica Witt and James Brockmole of Notre Dame University report five
studies in which they asked student participants to look at slides of
men carrying either guns or harmless objects. The students had about
a half-second to indicate whether the person was armed or not by
raising or lowering a lever. The experiment varied the handle of
that lever. In one condition, it was shaped like a realistic-looking
toy handgun. It the other, it was a rubber ball. The results showed
that the participants were more likely to “see” the person in the
slide as holding a gun when they themselves were holding a gun than
when they were holding a ball.
The authors interpret these findings as
consistent with the theory of event coding. This theory is a
scientific variation on the old saying that when you're holding a
hammer, everything looks like a nail. When planning an action with
an object or tool, you are predisposed to identify other objects on
which the tool might be used.
The authors also considered the theory
of conceptual priming. This theory suggests that the mere presence
of a weapon in the environment predisposes people to “see” other
weapons. They rule this explanation out due to one of their five
experiments. In this variation, a real firearm was placed on the
table while the subjects were performing the task using the lever
with the rubber ball handle. There was no greater tendency to see
the man in the slide as holding a firearm when a real gun was present
in their environment than when it was not.
I suspect that they ruled out the priming explanation prematurely. First of all, there are other
studies showing that aggressive cues in the environment affect
behavior. For example, in a study by Berkowitz and LePage,
frustrated participants were more likely to respond aggressively when
there were weapons (a handgun and a rifle) on the table than when
there was either a neutral object (a badminton racquet) or nothing on
the table. Secondly, in the Witt and Brockmole study, participants
were exposed to many photos of handguns, and guns were referred to when explaining the task. It's possible that
in such a gun-saturated environment, the presence of yet another
gun—albeit a real one—didn't make much difference.
I go into these details not only
because I believe in priming—an effect supported by literally
thousands of studies. It also affects the practical implications of Witt and Brockmole studies. A strict interpretation of them would state that the
bias to “see” a gun occurs only when you are holding a gun in
your hand.
In this country, all but eight states
permit ordinary people to openly carry a firearm either on their
person or in their car (although some of them require a license), and
all but Illinois (and D. C.) allow people to carry concealed weapons.
This research implies that carrying a firearm makes you more likely
to see others as dangerous. Does it matter whether you are carrying
the gun in your hand, in a holster, or in the glove compartment of
your car? Probably. You are more likely to be aware of the gun when
it's in your hand (as Zimmerman's apparently was). But I suspect
that carrying a concealed weapon alters threat perception as well.
Maybe future studies will test the limits of this effect.
