Experimental Design Details
Our survey will be posted as a task on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) for registered MTurk workers. Once a worker has accepted our task, they will be prompted to read and react to four vignettes that each illustrate incidents of discrimination. Each vignette is accompanied by a question that asks respondents to assess the fairness of the illustrated discriminatory action on a 1-7 scale. These four vignettes will be presented in two stages, each comprising two scenarios.
In stage one, respondents will be assigned to one of four treatments: SB, TB, SW and TW, where S and T denote Statistical and Taste-based discrimination, and W and B indicate that the person who is discriminated against is either White or Black. (The discriminator is always White when the discriminate is Black, and vice versa.) The two scenarios in stage one are distinguished by the sub-type of discrimination described (E versus C or L versus H) and are administered in random order.
In stage two, each respondent is re-assigned to one of the three treatments they did not experience in stage one, and again encounter two scenarios representing sub-types of either statistical- or taste-based discrimination.
After assessing the four vignettes, subjects will be answer two follow-up questions. The first will ask respondents to provide a written rationale for their fairness assessment of the last vignette they encountered. The second asks all respondents to assess the relative availability of economic opportunities between Black and White people in the U.S. using a rating scale similar to the vignette questions.
Finally, respondents will answer six background questions on their race, gender, age, education, party preference, and political leaning (e.g. liberal, moderate, conservative). These follow-up and background questions will be the same for all respondents to the survey.