Framing Effects in Causal Attributions of Behavior

Various theories have been offered about the significance of attributing behavioral characteristics - for example, propensity to violence, intelligence, alcoholism, and obesity to genes or genetic inheritance. On the one hand, genetic explanations may absolve people from blame for characteristics considered socially undesirable; on the other hand, belief in genetic determinism may signify that these undesirable characteristics are unchangeable, and that efforts to improve the environment for example, to improve educational opportunities for Blacks and women are futile and unnecessary. Such beliefs about the role of genes are especially significant if they are used to justify discrimination or prejudice toward minority groups. Work by Jayaratne and her colleagues (forthcoming), as well as others suggests that the attribution of individual and group differences to genetic causes is greater among Whites than among Blacks, and is linked to prejudiced attitudes toward minority groups. Singer and Antonucci (unpublished) found a similarly greater tendency for Whites to attribute behavior to genes even when the question involved abstract characteristics rather than differences between groups. Our current work, on the other hand (Singer et al., in progress), finds a consistent tendency for Black raters as well as less educated raters to make more genetic attributions than White raters or better educated raters. Both race and education make an independent contribution to the rating of the behavioral characteristics. We believe that these and other differences in findings can be accounted for, in large part, by differences in the way questions have been asked; in other words, to differences in framing (CITES). The present proposal aims to test the hypothesis of framing effects empirically, using a factorial experimental design administered on the Web. Differences in framing of the survey questions are important because they are likely to reflect similar differences in the public discourse on the issue, which in turn affects public attitudes and government policies.