Download data and study materials from OSF
Principal investigator:
N. Derek Brown
University of California, Berkeley
Email: d_brown@berkeley.edu
Homepage: https://www.nderekbrown.com/
Sample size: 2013
Field period: 05/28/2021-09/09/2021
H1. Participants exposed to a joint evaluation will perceive equality policies as less harmful to advantaged groups than participants who view the equality policy in isolation.
H2. Participants exposed to a joint evaluation will support the policy more and be more likely to vote in support of the policy than participants who view the equality policy in isolation.
H3 (exploratory). Advantaged group participants (i.e., White respondents) will perceive the equality policies as more harmful to their group than will disadvantaged group members (i.e., non-White respondents).
In the intervention condition, we informed participants that there are two ways to achieve equality to reduce the racial wage gap during the COVID recovery period:
– Option A would increase the direct payments and tax breaks to Black and Hispanic workers while not changing payments provided to white workers, until equality is achieved.
– Option B would decrease direct payments and tax breaks to white workers while not changing payments Black and Hispanic workers, until equality is achieved.
In the control (i.e., separate evaluation) condition, we only presented participants with a policy proposal that increased direct payments and tax breaks to Black and Hispanic workers while not changing the payments provided to white workers, until equality is achieved.
H1 was not supported. We conducted a linear regression to examine whether policy framing (single evaluation = 0, joint evaluation = 1) influenced how respondents perceived the policy’s impact on the advantaged group. Results revealed no significant difference in perceptions of how the policy would affect advantaged group members, b = 0.022, SE = 0.057, t(1974) = 0.38, p = .705. Both participants in the control condition (M = -0.63, SE = 0.04) and the joint evaluation intervention condition (M = -0.61, SE = 0.04) perceived the equality policy as harmful to advantaged groups.
H2 was supported. We conducted separate linear regressions to determine whether policy framing significantly impacted people’s perceived support and voting intentions. Results revealed that participants in the joint evaluation condition (M = 0.04, SE = 0.07) were more supportive of the policy than participants in the single evaluation condition (M = -0.16, SE = 0.07), b = 0.20, SE = 0.096, t(1999) = 2.10, p = .036. Results also revealed that participants in the joint evaluation condition (62.9% vote in favor) were more likely to vote in support of the equality policy compared to participants in the control condition (50.8% vote in favor), b = 0.121, SE = 0.22, t(1964) = 5.47, p < .001.
H3 was supported. We conducted an exploratory linear regression to examine whether group status influenced how people believed the policy would affect advantaged group members. Advantaged group members (M = -0.79, SE = 0.03) perceived the policy as more harmful than disadvantaged group members (M = -0.29, SE = 0.05), b = 0.496, SE = 0.06, t(1974) = 8.31, p < .001. We find the same, albeit stronger, when comparing only White participants to Black and Hispanic participants (M = -0.24, SE = 0.06), b = 0.54, SE = 0.07, t(1813) = 8.23, p < .001.
We also conducted an exploratory analysis to examine the interaction between policy framing and group status on perceived policy impact. Consistent with the above results, we found that group status significantly predicted perceived policy impact, b = 0.593, SE = 0.084, t(1972) = 7.10, p < .001, and policy framing did not significantly predict perceived policy impact, b = 0.091, SE = 0.069, t(1972) = 1.31, p = 0.19. We found a non-significant interaction between group status and policy framing, b = -0.199, SE = 0.119, t(1972) = -1.67, p = .096.