Are the researchers own biases responsible for the findings?
This is an issue for all scientific research. Researchers usually have a hypothesis about how the data will turn out before conducting the study. Hypotheses are usually based on previous research and theory or researcher intuitions. 40 years of social science research has observed a link between racial attitudes and political orientation. So, there was reason to expect this to persist in the current study. The possibility that the researchers’ hypotheses influenced the outcome of the study is called “experimenter effects.” These influences can come in the form of how questions are asked, what the experimenter does in interaction with the participants (e.g., subtly encouraging different types of answers), and in how the data are analyzed or interpreted. In the current study, the questions were straightforward (e.g., How warmly do you feel about Black Americans?), the researchers never interacted with participants (all respondents to the racial attitude measures were volunteers at a publ
