Attitudes vs. Actions

BY JONATHAN FETTER-VORM

In 1931, a Stanford sociologist toured the country with two Chinese students to test a hypothesis: Do attitudes about racial discrimination differ from actions? In an illustrated feature story, graphic novelist Jonathan Fetter-Vorm, ’05, explores Professor Richard LaPiere’s study, which presented a discrepancy between white Americans’ stated biases and their on-the-ground behaviors, and illuminated the limits of questionnaires in sociological research.