Abstract
How we measure racial bias matters. A lengthy body of literature demonstrates that asking people about their racial biases leads to unreliable responses that underestimate the prevalence of prejudice. As a result, scholars have developed a number of techniques to uncover racial bias without cuing a defensive response from respondents. Factorial Experiments are one such widely used tech- nique. However, there is little empirical validation of this design relative to other techniques. I investigate the performance of both text-based and image based factorial experiments in the case of racial motivation for opposition to new housing development relative to a more traditional list experiment. Using data from a survey experiment conducted on 3,496 White respondents in the United States, the results demonstrate that these often used methods yield substantially different conclusions about the importance of racial biases in opposition to new housing construction. While the factorial experiments suggest little evidence of racial bias, the more traditional list experiment reveals that the potential for racial change in their neighborhood is a concern for a meaningful share of respondents. These findings contribute to the literature on how we measure attitudes related to racialized topics, and experimentally demonstrate that racial biases continue to matter to people’s views on housing.