The Minnesota ICE Videos and “They Saw A Protest”

Watching the different reactions to the Minnesota ICE videos brings to mind a study I wrote about here in 2011 that was published as a law review article, “They Saw a Protest.”

In the study, individuals are shown a video of a protest at a building. Individuals are then asked to say, based on the video, whether the protesters violated a law that that prohibits intentionally interfering with, obstructing, intimidating, or threatening a person seeking to enter, exit, or remain lawfully on the premises.  The video looked like this:

Now here’s the catch: There were actually two videos, not one. Each person was shown just one of the two.

The two videos were identical except that the designers of the study altered the videos to change what was being protested. One video was edited so that the protest was against military recruiters, and the second video was edited so that the protest is against an abortion clinic.

The two videos were substantively identical, but notice the very different culture wars resonance.  In the version of the protest against military recruiters, the protest was a “left” protest against a “right” policy.  In the version of the protest against the abortion clinic, the protest was a “right” protest against a “left” policy.  Again, it’s actually the same protest. Participants in the study saw exactly the same thing video of the protest itself.  But the ideological stakes were 180 degrees apart.

The result?

Whether protesters were seen as guilty or innocent depended a lot on the ideology of the study participant doing the seeing.  When assessing a purely factual question—did the protesters engage in criminal threats?—people were a lot more likely to answer “yes” if their ideological worldview matched that of the policy protested, and a lot more likely to answer “no” if their ideological worldview matched that of the protesters.  Put another way, people watching the video tended to see what matched their worldview.  

The whole study is here.