Trina Harmer 6th

Overview:
The purpose of this project is to find evidence supporting whether or
not race skews peoples decisions regarding political stations and who they
vote for. Most will deny that they put race into account when determining if
someone is capable of office; however, that doesnt mean that there isnt a
correlation. The goal here is to see if there is, if not an intentional bias, a bias
that could be self-conscious. For example, it has been proven that people are
more likely to see someone tall as a leader; however, nearly nobody would
say that someone is tall has better leadership skills because this is
something that goes on in the subconscious.
We are working to answer this by conducting an experiment. In order
to conduct this experiment, we paired with another group and conducted
surveys with randomly selected people in the valley. We planned to have 13
people (7 male and 6 female) given a survey corresponding to a white
senator running for office. The other group was assigned to give 12 people
(6 male and 6 female) a survey the exact same except that the picture of the
senator on it was black.
Hypotheses:
My group hypothesized that there would be bias because of race;
however, it wasnt as simple as everyone being racist against blacks. We

hypothesized that it would depend heavily on the age-group that someone

fell into to determine whether they were biased or not.
We decided that the older community would be racist. We decided this
because of experiences we have had with them. For example, I have a greataunt that is very adamant that Japanese people should not be allowed onto
Hawaii because they bombed it. Many older people stick with racist ideas
and dont change them as the times have changed.
The middle-aged community we thought wouldnt be biased, however,
because theyve seen the anti-racism things as well as racist thoughts and
we thought they would be able to make an unbiased decision on whether or
not they liked the senator.
The younger group was more complicated. We thought that the data
would should bias toward black people as opposed to white people, but not
because they were racist. People now days are often racist in the opposite
direction than you would think because they are afraid to be racist. People
are constantly being targeted for saying anything against a minority because
they are just discriminating against them. For this reason they reverse
discriminate.
This hypothesis is politically important because if it is true then as the
old are dying and the young take their places in the voting pool and political
positions, discrimination against blacks is ceasing to exist. However, a new
problem is being created in the reverse.

Methodology:
The survey was simple. We first handed the person being surveyed a
paper that had information about our fake senator as well as a picture. The
information included his background, education, work experience,
community service, as well as his positions on issues; however, what the
specific details on the sheet are not important because they stayed constant
throughout the experiment. The only thing that changed between the
surveys was whether or not the picture of the senator was white or black.
The person was then handed a survey about how they feel about the senator
on the information sheet. This survey asked if the participant was male or
female, what their age bracket was, as well as their religious affiliation. The
survey then had 5 statements about the senator the person decided whether
they strongly agreed, agreed, were neutral, disagreed, or strongly disagreed.
The first statement was: He has sufficient education to be a U. S. Senator
from Utah. The second statement was: He has sufficient work experience to
be a U. S. Senator from Utah. The third statement was: He demonstrates
strong leadership skills. The fourth statement was: He has the kinds of life
experiences that will help him understand average Utahans. The last
statement was: I support more of his policy positions than I oppose. We did
not choose to add a question because we did not feel the survey needed
another question.

My group was in charge of doing the half of the surveys with the
picture of the white guy on them while the other group did the ones with the
black guy on them. We collected the data as planned to get our results.
Results:
The results of this experiment were not as expected. I thought there
would be a clear trend. As we went through collecting data, I was more
convinced there would be a trend because it didnt take most people very
long to do the survey. You could tell that they didnt take very long reading
the information for the majority of the people. This led me to believe that
relied more on their instincts or their subconscious. However, there were the
exceptions. There was one man that analyzed the questionnaire and filled it
out and first asked if the man was real. Since he was done filling out the form
I saw no reason I couldnt tell him it was. He then went on to say that he had
the impression that the survey was supposed to try to prove that people
didnt like ObamaCare because that was one of the things that the fake
senator supported. From that example you can see that some analyzed the
survey much more than others.
Regardless, here is a table showing the test results:
Black Senator Survey
ages
21 years or less
21-30 years
31-40 years
41-50 years
51-60 years

Q1

Q2

Q3

Q4

Q5

123

124

123

123

111

24
1344

11
1134

11
2344

24
2344

12
1223

61 and over

23

1=
neutral

key

White Senator Survey

ages
21 years or less
21-30 years
31-40 years
41-50 years
51-60 years
61 and over

2= agree

23

3= strongly
agree

33

33

4= disagree

33

5=strongly disagree

Q1

Q2

Q3

Q4

Q5

22
23

12
23

14
23

22
23

12
15

1134
2233

2234
2222

1223
1222

1223
2223

1134
2223

I spent a lot of time trying to find any sort of pattern in this data and I
couldnt find anything. There just isnt enough data to see patterns.
I think we got these inconclusive results because of the lack of a
substantial amount of data. 25 people isnt very many. Also, it is hard to
compare the two sides of data when it wasnt the same people given each
survey. Different minds think differently.
Conclusion:
In conclusion, there is nothing to really conclude from this data. The
data cant prove anything because of the poor way it was conducted. It

would be really interesting to see the results of this experiment if it were to

be done correctly.
The most important thing to get accurate data on this is to show both
surveys to the same person; however, this causes complications. You must
trick the reader into thinking that they are real people. To do this, you cant
have the exact same information for each of the senators, but then again the
content cant be different or that could skew the results. That would be a
problem that should be further analyzed to find a solution.
The other important thing that was missing from this experiment was
sufficient data. One cannot determine any patterns for a population without a
good sample and 25 people is not nearly large enough.