Crossing Eden
Hello, my name is Yves Guillemot, Vivendi S.A.'s Employee of the Month!
Guys, can you believe it???? Can you believe it??? Are you blown away by this totally surprising news? Source
When people make appeals to democratic principles like freedom of speech they dont always represent a genuine interest in that principle, White said. We think of principles as ideas we use to guide behavior in our everyday lives. Our data show something different that we tend to make up our mind on something based on our attitudes in this case, racial attitudes and then decide that the principle is relevant or irrelevant. People do whatever best fits their pre-existing attitudes.
We look at people who defend anothers racist speech for example, defending someone who got fired for going into a racist rant at work with a free speech argument, Crandall said. What do we know about people making this argument? The correlation between using the free speech defense and peoples own racial prejudice is pretty high. Its racists defending racists.
Indeed, the new study reveals a positive correlation (Pearson r = .43) between having racial prejudice and defending racist speech using the free speech argument a stronger correlation than the researchers expected.
White and Crandall recruited hundreds of participants via the Amazon Mechanical Turk service, conducting several interrelated studies where participants responded to descriptions of recent news events or readings involving someone being punished for racist speech. The racial attitudes of the respondents themselves were gauged using the Henry and Sears Symbolic Racism 2000 scale, a standard measure of racial prejudice in social psychology and political science.
One finding suggests many who defend racist speech using the free speech argument might not extend the same principle of free speech to negative comments aimed at authority figures or the public in general.
You might think that, Maybe people who defend this racist speech are just big fans of free speech, that theyre principled supporters of freedom, Crandall said. Well, no. We give them a news article with the same speech aimed at police and prejudice scores are completely uncorrelated with defending speech aimed at police and also uncorrelated with snarky speech aimed at customers at a coffee shop, but with no racial content.
Indeed, people with high levels of prejudice were very sensitive to their own freedom of expression.
They werent defending their own attitudes, as much as defending to the death their right to say it, Crandall said. Just so long as the it is the prejudiced speech they share.