50 - Ethically Questionable Research

Summary

In early November 1999 I joined Stormfront, one of the first and largest neo-Nazi sites on the Internet. Every morning for about a year I logged into various discussion forums on the site to see what my Nazi cyber-friends were doing and how they were reacting to the events of the day. Soon I also started visiting the websites of White Aryan Resistance and the World Church of the Creator (proponents of Racial Holy War). What interested me about these groups was how the virulent racism of their members might differ psychologically from the everyday sort of prejudice that I typically studied in the laboratory.

Perhaps not surprisingly, one notable difference was the pride, conviction, and vindictiveness with which group members declared the inferiority of other races to their own, and indeed reveled in the hate crimes the reports of which occasionally appeared in the news. For example, although the murder of James Byrd took place more than a year prior to my joining, it was still a major topic of conversation among group members. One member even set up a “nigger dragging” contest on his website – complete with animations – to see who else could drag an African American to his death from the back of a truck but somehow keep the body intact for longer than had been the case with Byrd’s killers. My colleagues and I wondered how people developed such extraordinary attitudes, so we decided to conduct an experiment with group members to see whether these neo-Nazis were more motivated by out-group denigration (as seemed to be the case) or by in-group favoritism (as they claim in their discussions; Stormfront’s motto is “White Pride Worldwide”).