Leonardo Bursztyn (Program on Political Economy Seminar)

Date: 

Thursday, March 25, 2021, 4:30pm to 5:45pm

Location: 

Zoom - see below

Zoom links for Political Economy Seminar are distributed via the seminar's mailing list. You can sign up for the list using this link: https://lists.iq.harvard.edu/mailman/listinfo/ppe_list

All interested faculty and students are invited to attend.

Today's presenter

Leonardo Bursztyn (University of Chicago), "Disguising Prejudice: Popular Rationales as Excuses for Intolerant Expression"

Abstract

We study the use of popular rationales to justify public anti-minority actions. Rationales to oppose minorities change some people's private opinions, leading them to take anti-minority actions even if they are not prejudiced against minorities. When these rationales become widespread, prejudiced people can pool with unprejudiced people who are persuaded, decreasing the stigma associated with anti-minority expression and enabling greater public opposition to minority groups. We examine this mechanism through several large-scale experiments in the context of anti-immigrant behavior in the United States. In a rst experiment, subjects learn that a previous respondent authorized a donation to an anti-immigrant organization and then make an inference about the respondent's underlying motivations. Subjects informed that their matched respondent learned about a study claiming that immigrants increase crime rates before authorizing the donation see the respondent as less intolerant and more easily persuadable. In a second experiment, subjects learn about that same study and then choose whether to authorize a publicly observable donation to the anti-immigrant organization. Subjects who are informed that their exposure to the rationale will be publicly observable are substantially more likely to make the donation than subjects who are informed that their exposure will remain private. Our ndings suggest that prominent public gures can lower the social cost of intolerant expression by popularizing rationales, contributing to waves of anti-minority behavior.

Co-sponsored by FAS and IQSS, the Program on Political Economy (PE) supports research-related activities that integrate the study of economics and politics, whether by studying economic behavior in the political process or political behavior in the marketplace. In general, positive political economy is concerned with showing how observed differences among institutions affect political and economic outcomes in various social, economic, and political systems and how the institutions themselves change and develop in response to individual and collective beliefs, preferences, and strategies.

l_bursztyn_disguisingprejudice_october2020.pdf8.22 MB