The Howard League, a prison reform group, published an article in the London Metro on the 22nd of March 2000 titled “Justice is biased against blacks” (see appendix). This is an article written by a prison reform group and may be biased towards its cause.
This evidence illustrates that racism is an issue in the British legal system and this is why I wish to conduct my experiment. My aim is to see whether people are more likely to find a black man guilty of a crime.
Structure
. My hypothesis is that a white person will be more likely to find a black man guilty of a crime.
My methodology is an experiment due to its independent and dependent variables.
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Independent Variable: - Is a picture shown and is it of a black or a white man.
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Dependent Variable: - The guilt rating assigned.
Operations
I am measuring whether or not racism affects legal decisions. I have operationalised this by asking people to judge how guilty they believe a person to be on a scale of 0 to 10 with 0 being not guilty and 10 being guilty, producing ordinal data. My rationale is that because my experiment is a comparison of data between a black defendant and a white defendant, the numerical value of these ratings is less important. However this assumes that subjects consider a specific number to be a similar measure of guilt, as it is a small scale this should be the case.
Methodology
Sampling
I chose a rather select group for my experiment. All were pupils from Sevenoaks School, aged between 11 and 18 and Caucasian. This eliminated variables such as age. Also Sevenoaks is a co-educational, international school and so its students maybe more culturally aware. I asked every pupil I saw at both first break and lunch break over two days standing by the School Library.
Procedure
Preliminary experiment
The attractiveness of 10 pictures of white men and 10 of black men (from magazines) were rated with 1 being the most attractive and 10 being the least. I calculated the mean attractiveness of each man and took the two men of middle attractiveness, one white and one black (Results are in the appendix). This ensured that attractiveness was not a variable in my final experiment.
Main experiment
Using the two pictures from my preliminary experiment, I prepared and read to all subjects the account of a crime and verbatim instructions (see appendix) asking subjects to rate the defendants guilt on a scale of 0 to 10 with 10 being definitely guilty and 0 being definitely not guilty. The account was a summary of a burglary. After this I either showed the subject no picture (25 subjects) as a control, the picture of a white man (25 subjects) or the picture of the black man (25 subjects). The subjects then rated the defendant’s guilt. My control was to see how people rated the defendant without seeing a picture giving me an idea of how people perceive the account of the crime.
Materials
- Magazines – To collect pictures (see appendix)
(Sunday Supplements from Sunday Telegraph)
Data
The statistical test I used is the (Mann-Whitney U test) as I have ordinal data gathered under independent measures.
Results (For results of preliminary experiment see appendix.)
This section contains data illustrating the overall results (raw data is in appendix.). In the preliminary experiments, picture 6 showed the man of middle attractiveness for both white and black.
Table 1 The average guilt ratings for the defendants in the 3 conditions
(on a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 being not guilty and 10 being guilty)
Graph 1
Mann WhitneyU
This is a summary of the calculations and results (for full calculations see appendix). I had ranked the data and applied it to this formula:
N = No. Of subjects in group A
N = No. Of subjects in group B
R = Sum Of ranks in group A
The smaller of the two values should be compared to the critical value.
U is the smaller value and was compared to the critical value of 127. Since my calculated value is less than the table value, my results are significant at the 5% level. I have proved my hypothesis and therefore white people are more likely to find a black man guilty of a crime, rather than a white man.
Discussion
Criticisms
The sample size was not large enough meaning that anomalous results had an effect on the overall results. With more subjects fluctuations in peoples appreciation of my guilt scale would balance out giving more accurate results. The subjects were from a very specific group to avoid further variables such as age. However age would be a fascinating variable to add as a way of furthering the investigation. This specific sampling limits the application of the experiment because in reality people would be of all ages and educational backgrounds.
The photos may not have been of equal attractiveness. I may have chosen more attractive photos of white men explaining why they were found to be less likely to have committed the crime. It has been proven that more attractive people are less likely to be found guilty of a crime, this is known as the Halo Effect. I should have increased the size and variety of the sample of photographs.
The procedure used failed to make the experiment realistic. The conditions where very false, even if this was the only option available. This meant that the ecological validity was low. It is not possible to draw general conclusions such as the effect of race on judges and juries. The experiment could not be conducted under suitable conditions that would reflect this environment but the use of mock trials would make an interesting addition.
This study deals with the qualitative idea of racism and so it is hard to find an appropriate scale to quantitatively investigate racism. The scale used had little actual meaning. Some people may be more willing to find someone guilty of a crime and others may be more willing to use the scale to its limits. These sorts of problems with data could be ironed out with larger sample sizes. Another way of operationalising this study would be to use identity parades, examining how many times white people picked a black man out producing quantitative data and improving the ecological validity.
This experiment has few ethical problems. There was no deception and no psychological trauma. I did not seek permission from the people in the photos to take part in the study. It may be that they did not want to be involved in the experiment. Subjects were not debriefed as to the purpose of the experiment and have no idea of the results.
Theoretical Implications
My conclusion states that white people are more likely to find a black man guilty of a crime. This means that in a “multicultural” society racial stereotypes still exist whether this is at a subconscious or conscious level. People believe that a black man is more likely to commit a crime despite there being no evidence to prove that this is true. As Bruner and Tagiuri theorised in their Implicit Personality Theory, certain physical traits are associated with personality traits. There seems to be evidence to suggest that racial stereotypes exist, associating blacks which committing crimes as Katz and Braly discovered back in 1933. Some 70 years on, despite all human rights progress, racism exists. My study reinforces the investigation by the Howard League, which states that the British League system is biased against blacks. This creates issues when considering the validity of trial by jury. A majority white jury is more likely to convict a black man of a crime than they would a white man if they were tried for the same crime. These are rather sweeping statements to make on limited information. To draw such strong conclusions is impossible but my investigation, when added to others, casts enough of a shadow to warrant further investigation.
