Unbiased people naturally adopt crime-commission framing over law-obedience framing

Evidence

Quattrone and Warren (1985) showed a sample of Stanford undergraduates the 1982 crime statistics, framed either in terms of the percentages of blacks and whites who were arrested for crime or the percentages who were not. Other respondents were not exposed to these data. As implied by the ratio-difference principle, the respondents who were exposed to the crime commission statistics considered the crime rate to be substantially higher in black communities than in white communities, whereas those exposed to the law-obedience statistics considered the communities to be more at par in crime. Furthermore, the subjects who were not shown the FBI crime data gave responses that were virtually indistinguishable from those given by subjects exposed to the crime commission statistics. This comparison suggests that people may generally formulate beliefs about the proportions of blacks and whites who commit crime, not the proportions who abide by the law. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 2484

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Kahneman & Tversky’s framing effects and the ratio-difference principle from this same chapter.
• QUESTION: Why do people’s default beliefs mirror the crime-commission frame — is it media exposure, availability of arrest stats, or something cognitive? Worth chasing.