Challenging Politicians on Race in Interviews: Social Dominance Orientation, Perceived Journalistic Credibility, Bias, and Appropriateness

ABSTRACT

This study uses a randomized posttest-only between-subjects experiment (N = 148) to investigate the communication rules participants perceive after a journalist interviews a politician about race-related housing policies. Perceived question appropriateness, journalistic bias, and perceived credibility (journalist and politician) were examined depending on the journalist’s varying adversarial stances (no challenge, simple challenge, contextualized challenge). Social dominance orientation (SDO), a key concept associated with racial intolerance, was used as a moderator to understand perceptions of the interview style, the journalist, and the politician. Overall, SDO weighs more heavily than does level of challenge, with high-SDO participants perceiving journalistic challenges on the question of race less appropriate than do low-SDO individuals. Contrary to expectations, low-SDO participants viewed a contextual challenge as less appropriate and the journalist as more biased than when a simple challenge was used. Overall, participants endorsed journalists engaging in the watchdog role.

KEYWORDS:

• Communication rules
• journalists
• political interviews
• race
• social dominance orientation (SDO)
• adversarial interviewing
• role perceptions
• bias

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Scholars from a Marxist perspective (Johnson 2019; Reed 2019) offer the claim that while the New Deal was discriminatory against Blacks it also helped many Blacks. They argue that there is not a monolithic U.S. Black population and we should look at policy effects in a more complex way. They put forth that inequalities are primarily the result of differences in power and class rather than racial or ethnic discrimination. There is no doubt that economics factors into the treatment of Blacks in the U.S. Incarceration, forced labor, and racial discrimination were tied to the economic prosperity of White elites in the South during Reconstruction and poor Whites were also caught up in the convict-leasing systems (Forde and Bedingfield 2021). On this issue, it may not be solely economics or racial discrimination, but that both are intertwined and that there are differentiations among Black American experiences.

2 Before data collection, we performed a power analysis using G*Power (Faul et al. 2009). Under the conservative assumption that the effect size of SDO on our outcome variables is moderate (f = .25, α = .05), one would require a minimum of 158 participants across three experimental groups to obtain power of 80%. Mindful of the need for data cleaning, we oversampled. The final sample size is similar to comparable studies (e.g., Pratto and Shih 2000), providing substantial power (77%) to detect at least a medium effect (f = .25, α = .05) and sufficient power (99%) to detect a large effect (f = .40, α = .05).

3 To identify suspect cases, we utilized the 16-item SDO question battery that appeared in a randomized order and uses 7-point response scales (1 = very negative, 7 = very positive), with half being reverse-worded (see Measures section for more details). Based on the interpretive “near means related” heuristic (Tourangeau, Couper, and Conrad 2004), some respondents expect items to be more closely related when they appear physically near one another, leading them to believe they answer the items more consistently—but in fact inconsistently if reverse wording is applied. Consistent with this heuristic, this means that participants in our sample who, before reverse-coding the data, chose three (or fewer) distinct response options and demonstrated less than one standard deviation across all 16 items, thus showing typical nondifferentiation response style, were excluded. To illustrate, a high-SDO individual is generally expected to select high responses on one half (i.e., straightforwardly worded items) and low responses on the other half (i.e., reverse-worded items). Someone not processing the meaning of the statements, that is, not noticing the reverse wording and thus showing carelessness in answering, will merely select responses on one side of the scale.

4 Excluding those who spent less than ten seconds on the page (i.e., the lowest decile).

5 See the supplementary material for an additional analysis including the middle third of our sample distribution (i.e., individuals with moderate SDO beliefs [1.33–2.67, n = 49]).

6 However, a post-hoc comparison revealed only a marginally significant difference (Δ = 0.75, p = 0.10) between the no-challenge and contextualized challenge condition regarding credibility perceptions.