Description |
A recent article reported evidence from a survey experiment indicating that Americans reward whites more than blacks for hard work but penalize blacks more than whites for laziness. However, the present study demonstrates that these inferences were based on an unrepresentative selection of possible analyses: strength of inferences from results reported in the original article were weakened when combined with results from equivalent or relevant analyses not reported in the original article; moreover, newly-reported evidence revealed heterogeneity in racial bias: respondents given a direct choice between equivalent targets of different races favored the black target over the white target. Results illustrate how the presence of researcher degrees of freedom can foster production of inferences that are not representative of all inferences that could have been produced from a set of data, thus illustrating the value in preregistering research design protocols and requiring public posting of data.
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