🚨New pub alert! 🚨 Out now in New Media & Society, @Dan_S_Lane (@CommUcsb) and I explore the utility of re-framing the goal of confronting racist speech online from attitude change to norm setting. A 🧵 (1/7) @politicalscience@communicationscholars@socialpsych
Given the descriptive norms of social media and how entrenched racist attitudes might be, confronting racist speech to change such attitudes might seem impossible. But setting social norms against racist speech may seem like a more achievable task. 2/7 @politicalscience@communicationscholars@socialpsych
We explore this in an online survey experiment conducted during the 2020 U.S. presidential election and find that white social media users reported greater willingness to confront online racist speech for the purpose of norm setting than for the purpose of attitude change. 3/7 @politicalscience@communicationscholars@socialpsych
Participants were more willing to confront if they were less cynical of political discussion and when the confrontation target was experimentally manipulated to be relationally closer (e.g., family, friends) compared to relationally distant. (e.g., strangers, acquaintances). 4/7 @politicalscience@communicationscholars@socialpsych
Even better, the effect of the confrontation goal manipulation held even for people who were more cynical about the usefulness of political discussions and when the target of confrontation was relationally more distant! 5/7 @politicalscience@communicationscholars@socialpsych
We conclude by noting that attitude change as a goal does little to change the social power dynamics in which racism thrives. It's based on the hope that racist speakers will refrain from such behavior out of the goodness of their heart. Norm-setting addresses power dynamics. 6/7 @politicalscience@communicationscholars@socialpsych
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