Pit Bull Positivity: Changing Portraits and Opinions of a Stigmatized Group

• In Event: Attitudes Toward Social Groups

Abstract

Our related work has found pervasive prejudice and discrimination against Pit Bulls in public opinion, news coverage, public policy and law. We also show that this prejudice and discrimination is racialized--rooted in the dog breed’s association with black culture and African American owners. But it’s not all bad news for Pit Bulls. While news stories about Pits has been consistently and overwhelmingly negative for several decades now, the rise of social media has provided a remarkable outlet for “Pit Bull positivity.” In fact, our automated content analyses of all social media postings since 2009 show that there are far more positive tweets and Instagram posts about Pit Bulls than any other dog breed. After presenting those content analyses, this paper then shows that social media exposure is strongly linked to positive opinions of Pit Bulls and that experimentally assigning positive videos about Pit Bulls strongly reduces prejudice against the breed. Those increasingly positive portraits of Pit Bulls have had real world effects on public opinion, too. Our surveys show there has been a sharp increase in positive attitudes about Pit Bulls in the past five years; and much like growing support for interracial marriage in the 1960-1990s and same sex marriage over the past two decades, we show that young people are at the vanguard of this Pit Bull positivity. Young adults, who were socialized amidst more positive portraits of Pits than older Americans, are consistently 40-60 percentage points more supportive of the breed than senior citizens. We conclude by discussing how changing portraits and opinions of Pit Bulls can provide insights into prejudice reduction towards other stigmatized groups.

Authors

• Mary McThomas, University of California, Irvine

• Michael Tesler, UC Irvine