Science That Matters » Violence

Are Whites More Supportive of the Death Penalty for Blacks?

aaronsw — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 06:02:36 +0000

In 2001 political scientists Mark Peffley and John Hurwitz carried out two surveys. The first one found:

Do you favor or oppose the death penalty for persons convicted of murder?

Somewhat favor: 29%
Strongly favor: 36%

The second one found:

Some people say that the death penalty is unfair because most of the people who are executed are African-Americans. Do you favor or oppose the death penalty for persons convicted of murder?

Somewhat favor: 25%
Strongly favor: 52%

Total support jumped 12 points from 65% to 77%, while strong support jumped 16 points (36% to 52%).

Read the paper

Additional results: Another condition replaced “mostly black” with “many innocents” with no significant effect. 50% of blacks favored the death penalty in the neutral phrasing, 38% in the “mostly black” condition, and 34% in the “many innocents” condition.

Godly violence is next to human violence

aaronsw — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 03:13:58 +0000

The Bible, as any casual reader of The Brick Testament knows, is an exceedingly violent book. And any reader of the news knows that violent people often use God to justify their actions. But is this just coincidence?

Brad J. Bushman, a psychologist who studies the effects of TV and video game violence, recently joined Robert D. Ridge, Enny Das, Colin W. Key, and Gregory M. Busath in testing the question. They took some Godful students at Brigham Young University and some atheist students at a university in Amsterdam and split them into two groups. Half heard a story about how an Israelite couple visited the town of Gibeah, where the townspeople raped and beat the woman to death. The Israelites retaliated by attacking the town. The other half heard the same story, but with an additional paragraph noting that God endorsed the retaliation.

Then the students were placed in a competitive game where they could blast noises into the ears of their opponents of variable volume. For students who believed in God, those who heard the passage in which God endorsed the retaliation made the noises as loud as possible twice as often as those who only heard the violent story. For students who did not believe in God, the increase was 40%.

~650,000 excess deaths in Iraq; ~600,000 due to violence

aaronsw — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 06:16:32 +0000

A study by Gilbert Burnham, Riyadh Lafta, Shannon Doocy, and Les Roberts found using extremely sound statistical methods that by July 2006, the Iraq war was responsible for somewhere between 390,000 and 940,000 excess deaths.

The paper [PDF]
Responses to criticism