Siri Carpenter, Scientific American, May 2008
Subliminal Stereotyping
* All of us hold unconscious clichéd beliefs about social groups: black and white, female and male, elderly and young, gay and straight, fat and thin.
* Such implicit bias is far more prevalent than the more overt, or explicit, prejudice that we associate with, for instance, the Ku Klux Klan or the Nazis.
* Certain social scenarios can automatically activate implicit stereotypes and attitudes, which then can affect our perceptions, judgments and behavior, including the choice of whom to befriend, whom to hire and, in the case of doctors, what treatment to deliver.
* Recent research suggests we can reshape our implicit attitudes and beliefs—or at least curb their effects on our behavior.
“There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life,” Jesse Jackson once told an audience, “than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery—then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.”
{snip}
Using a variety of sophisticated methods, psychologists have established that people unwittingly hold an astounding assortment of stereotypical beliefs and attitudes about social groups: black and white, female and male, elderly and young, gay and straight, fat and thin. Although these implicit biases inhabit us all, we vary in the particulars, depending on our own group membership, our conscious desire to avoid bias and the contours of our everyday environments. For instance, about two thirds of whites have an implicit preference for whites over blacks, whereas blacks show no average preference for one race over the other.
{snip}
The persistence of explicit bias in contemporary culture has led some critics to maintain that implicit bias is of secondary concern. But hundreds of studies of implicit bias show that its effects can be equally insidious. Most social psychologists believe that certain scenarios can automatically activate implicit stereotypes and attitudes, which then can affect our perceptions, judgments and behavior. “The data on that are incontrovertible,” concludes psychologist Russell H. Fazio of Ohio State University.
Now researchers are probing deeper. They want to know: Where exactly do such biases come from? How much do they influence our outward behavior? And if stereotypes and prejudiced attitudes are burned into our psyches, can learning more about them help to tell each of us how to override them?
Sticking Together
Implicit biases grow out of normal and necessary features of human cognition, such as our tendency to categorize, to form cliques and to absorb social messages and cues. To make sense of the world around us, we put things into groups and remember relations between objects and actions or adjectives: for instance, people automatically note that cars move fast, cookies taste sweet and mosquitoes bite. Without such deductions, we would have a lot more trouble navigating our environment and surviving in it.
Such associations often reside outside conscious understanding; thus, to measure them, psychologists rely on indirect tests that do not depend on people’s ability or willingness to reflect on their feelings and thoughts. Several commonly used methods gauge the speed at which people associate words or pictures representing social groups—young and old, female and male, black and white, fat and thin, Democrat and Republican, and so on—with positive or negative words or with particular stereotypic traits.
{snip}
Self-interest often shores up implicit biases. To bolster our own status, we are predisposed to ascribe superior characteristics to the groups to which we belong, or in-groups, and to exaggerate differences between our own group and outsiders [see “The New Psychology of Leadership,” by Stephen D. Reicher, S. Alexander Haslam and Michael J. Platow; Scientific American Mind, August/September 2007].
Even our basic visual perceptions are skewed toward our in-groups. Many studies have shown that people more readily remember faces of their own race than of other races. In recent years, scientists have begun to probe the neural basis for this phenomenon, known as the same-race memory advantage. In a 2001 study neurosurgeon Alexandra J. Golby, now at Harvard Medical School, and her colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging to track people’s brain activity while they viewed a series of white and black faces. The researchers found that individuals exhibited greater activity in a brain area involved in face recognition known as the fusiform face area [see “A Face in the Crowd,” by Nina Bublitz] when they viewed faces of their own racial group than when they gazed at faces of a different race. The more strongly a person showed the same-race memory advantage, the greater this brain difference was.
This identification with a group occurs astoundingly quickly. In a 2002 study University of Washington psychologist Anthony G. Greenwald and his colleagues asked 156 people to read the names of four members of two hypothetical teams, Purple and Gold, then spend 45 seconds memorizing the names of the players on just one team. Next, the participants performed two tasks in which they quickly sorted the names of team members. In one task, they grouped members of one team under the concept “win” and those of the other team under “lose,” and in the other they linked each team with either “self” or “other.” The researchers found that the mere 45 seconds that a person spent thinking about a fictional team made them identify with that team (linking it with “self”) and implicitly view its members as “winners.”
Some implicit biases appear to be rooted in strong emotions. In a 2004 study Ohio State psychologist Wil A. Cunningham and his colleagues measured white people’s brain activity as they viewed a series of white and black faces. The team found that black faces—as compared with white faces—that they flashed for only 30 milliseconds (too quickly for participants to notice them) triggered greater activity in the amygdala, a brain area associated with vigilance and sometimes fear. The effect was most pronounced among people who demonstrated strong implicit racial bias. Provocatively, the same study revealed that when faces were shown for half a second—enough time for participants to consciously process them—black faces instead elicited heightened activity in prefrontal brain areas associated with detecting internal conflicts and controlling responses, hinting that individuals were consciously trying to suppress their implicit associations.
Why might black faces, in particular, provoke vigilance? Northwestern University psychologist Jennifer A. Richeson speculates that American cultural stereotypes linking young black men with crime, violence and danger are so robust that our brains may automatically give preferential attention to blacks as a category, just as they do for threatening animals such as snakes. In a recent unpublished study Richeson and her colleagues found that white college students’ visual attention was drawn more quickly to photographs of black versus white men, even though the images were flashed so quickly that participants did not consciously notice them. This heightened vigilance did not appear, however, when the men in the pictures were looking away from the camera. (Averted eye gaze, a signal of submission in humans and other animals, extinguishes explicit perceptions of threat.)
Whatever the neural underpinnings of implicit bias, cultural factors—such as shopworn ethnic jokes, careless catchphrases and playground taunts dispensed by peers, parents or the media—often reinforce such prejudice. Subtle sociocultural signals may carry particularly insidious power. In a recent unpublished study psychologist Luigi Castelli of the University of Padova in Italy and his colleagues examined racial attitudes and behavior in 72 white Italian families. They found that young children’s racial preferences were unaffected by their parents’ explicit racial attitudes (perhaps because those attitudes were muted). Children whose mothers had more negative implicit attitudes toward blacks, however, tended to choose a white over a black playmate and ascribed more negative traits to a fictional black child than to a white child. Children whose mothers showed less implicit racial bias on an implicit bias test were less likely to exhibit such racial preferences.
Many of our implicit associations about social groups form before we are old enough to consider them rationally. In an unpublished experiment Mahzarin R. Banaji, a psychologist at Harvard University, and Yarrow Dunham, now a psychologist at the University of California, Merced, found that white preschoolers tended to categorize racially ambiguous angry faces as black rather than white; they did not do so for happy faces. And a 2006 study by Banaji and Harvard graduate student Andrew S. Baron shows that full-fledged implicit racial bias emerges by age six—and never retreats. “These filters through which people see the world are present very early,” Baron concludes.
Dangerous Games
{snip}
A growing body of work indicates that implicit attitudes do, in fact, contaminate our behavior. Reflexive actions and snap judgments may be especially vulnerable to implicit associations. A number of studies have shown, for instance, that both blacks and whites tend to mistake a harmless object such as a cell phone or hand tool for a gun if a black face accompanies the object. This “weapon bias” is especially strong when people have to judge the situation very quickly.
In a 2002 study of racial attitudes and nonverbal behavior, psychologist John F. Dovidio, now at Yale University, and his colleagues measured explicit and implicit racial attitudes among 40 white college students. The researchers then asked the white participants to chat with one black and one white person while the researchers videotaped the interaction. Dovidio and his colleagues found that in these interracial interactions, the white participants’ explicit attitudes best predicted the kinds of behavior they could easily control, such as the friendliness of their spoken words. Participants’ nonverbal signals, however, such as the amount of eye contact they made, depended on their implicit attitudes.
As a result, Dovidio says, whites and blacks came away from the conversation with very different impressions of how it had gone. Whites typically thought the interactions had gone well, but blacks, attuned to whites’ nonverbal behavior, thought otherwise. Blacks also assumed that the whites were conscious of their nonverbal behavior and blamed white prejudice. {snip}
Implicit biases can infect more deliberate decisions, too. In a 2007 study Rutgers University psychologists Laurie A. Rudman and Richard D. Ashmore found that white people who exhibited greater implicit bias toward black people also reported a stronger tendency to engage in a variety of discriminatory acts in their everyday lives. These included avoiding or excluding blacks socially, uttering racial slurs and jokes, and insulting, threatening or physically harming black people.
{snip}
Implicit bias may sway hiring decisions. In a recent unpublished field experiment economist Dan-Olof Rooth of the University of Kalmar in Sweden sent corporate employers identical job applications on behalf of fictional male candidates—under either Arab-Muslim or Swedish names. Next he tracked down the 193 human resources professionals who had evaluated the applications and measured their implicit biases concerning Arab-Muslim men. Rooth discovered that the greater the employer’s bias, the less likely he or she was to call an applicant with a name such as Mohammed or Reza for an interview. Employers’ explicit attitudes toward Muslims did not correspond to their decision to interview (or fail to consider) someone with a Muslim name, possibly because many recruiters were reluctant to reveal those attitudes.
Unconscious racial bias may also infect critical medical decisions. In a 2007 study Banaji and her Harvard colleagues presented 287 internal medicine and emergency care physicians with a photograph and brief clinical vignette describing a middle-aged patient—in some cases black and in others white—who came to the hospital complaining of chest pain. Most physicians did not acknowledge racial bias, but on average they showed (on an implicit bias test) a moderate to large implicit antiblack bias. And the greater a physician’s racial bias, the less likely he or she was to give a black patient clot-busting thrombolytic drugs.
Beating Back Prejudice
{snip}
Seeing targeted groups in more favorable social contexts can help thwart biased attitudes. In laboratory studies, seeing a black face with a church as a background, instead of a dilapidated street corner, considering familiar examples of admired blacks such as actor Denzel Washington and athlete Michael Jordan, and reading about Arab-Muslims’ positive contributions to society all weaken people’s implicit racial and ethnic biases. In real college classrooms, students taking a course on prejudice reduction who had a black professor showed greater reductions in both implicit and explicit prejudice at the end of the semester than did those who had a white professor. {snip}
{snip}
In addition, people who report a strong personal motivation to be nonprejudiced tend to harbor less implicit bias. And some studies indicate that people who are good at using logic and willpower to control their more primitive urges, such as trained meditators, exhibit less implicit bias. Brain research suggests that the people who are best at inhibiting implicit stereotypes are those who are especially skilled at detecting mismatches between their intentions and their actions.
But wresting control over automatic processes is tiring and can backfire. If people leave interracial interactions feeling mentally and emotionally drained, they may simply avoid contact with people of a different race or foreign culture. {snip}
{snip}
Taking Control
Despite such data, some psychologists still question the concept of implicit bias. In a 2004 article in the journal Psychological Inquiry, psychologists Hal R. Arkes of Ohio State and Philip E. Tetlock of the University of California, Berkeley, suggest that implicit associations between, for example, black people and negative words may not necessarily reflect implicit hostility toward blacks. They could as easily reflect other negative feelings, such as shame about black people’s historical treatment at the hands of whites. They also argue that any unfavorable associations about black people we do hold may simply echo shared knowledge of stereotypes in the culture. In that sense, Arkes and Tetlock maintain, implicit measures do not signify anything meaningful about people’s internal state, nor do they deserve to be labeled “prejudiced”—a term they feel should be reserved for attitudes a person deliberately endorses.
{snip}
Original article
(Posted on May 7, 2008)
Comments
Preference is not prejudice.
Posted by at 5:45 PM on May 7
What A waste of ink and paper. This article would be useful for your head, take it with you when you go there, and don’t forget to flush.
Posted by The Old Sage at 5:55 PM on May 7
I dunno; MY bigotness was forged on the southside of Chicago in the 1960s. MY stereotypes conform to what I have experienced; the Black interpersonal violence and insults hurled against me for not being Black.
Is Scientific American saying there’s actually something WRONG with me?
Posted by at 6:04 PM on May 7
A Pakistani store-owner once explained to me that he’d hire other Pakistanis by preference, not because he disliked ordinary vanilla Americans, but because he was confident that he knew what to expect from another Pakistani.
All the “scientific” gassing about “implicit bias” and “discriminatory acts” in this article may point to nothing more “insidious” than that people are comfortable with what’s familiar to them.
In any case, the Scientific American’s repetitive hammering on “stereotypes” and “prejudiced attitudes” suggests that something other than “science” is at work here. Are circular arguments any more valid in “science” than elsewhere?
And isn’t it interesting, to put it mildly, that the guilt-finger in all this “science” invariably points at whites?
Posted by Trilby at 6:10 PM on May 7
There you have it, we’re all racists. The only choice now is whether we must all enter reeducation camps, or whether we’re allowed to be ourselves and stop being ashamed of it.
Posted by Diamed at 6:20 PM on May 7
“For instance, about two thirds of whites have an implicit preference for whites over blacks, whereas blacks show no average preference for one race over the other.”
Simply reading the above, I had difficultly going on.
Blacks show no average preference for one race over another? Talk about a broad generalization! Show me the research on this one.
“Some implicit biases appear to be rooted in strong emotions. In a 2004 study Ohio State psychologist Wil A. Cunningham and his colleagues measured white people’s brain activity as they viewed a series of white and black faces.”
Isn’t most awareness based on strong emotions? I don’t remember minutia of my commute but when I experience an extraordinary event, I register the event in my memory.
Despite what liberals and do-gooders demand we believe, bias and prejudice are not born of ignorance, they are born of experience.
As they say, a liberal is someone who has never been mugged.
Posted by sbuffalonative at 6:28 PM on May 7
“But wresting control over automatic processes is tiring and can backfire.”
And it gets scores of people killed on annual basis, too.
Do these psychology professors not have access to local, state and federal crime statistics? Facts are not cultural stereotypes. Blacks are more dangerous than whites - and I don’t care if that offends a bunch of university psychologists either.
Posted by Civilized Neighbor at 6:43 PM on May 7
To these people, every healthy instinct is pathological. As a rule, I utterly despise psychologists. May all their daughters marry Blacks.
Posted by Schoolteacher at 6:59 PM on May 7
As long as we accept drivel like this as real, we deserve what we get. Psychology as a profession is a sick joke. Shame on all of us for allowing this.
Posted by at 7:09 PM on May 7
The liberals have no idea the can of worms they have opened with this one.
They want to instill permanent guilt in whites.
But what they have done is made racism normal, rational and completely justified.
The logical endpoint of what they are saying is that multiculturalism is unnatural while racism is a biological imperative.
Posted by at 7:48 PM on May 7
‘…psychologists…found that white people who exhibited greater implicit bias toward black people also reported a stronger tendency to engage in a variety of discriminatory acts… These included avoiding or excluding blacks socially, uttering racial slurs and jokes, and insulting, threatening or physically harming black people.’
My behaviour towards blacks is solely governed by my experiences with them. All of it negative.
Whenever I can I will engage in many of the ‘discriminatory acts’ detailed above and I do so with a zeal that is informed by the knowledge that they are an alien, ignorant, whining, parasitical, hateful, semi-retarded, grievance-laden sub-species that should be confined to the hellhole that is Mother Africa.
Irrespective of your actions you can never win with blacks. Avoid all contact with them.
Posted by Mark at 7:55 PM on May 7
By his own words, Jesse Jackson has admitted to engaging in racial profiling.
Posted by RJS at 8:01 PM on May 7
In an unpublished study Payne and his colleague Brandon D. Stewart, now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Queensland in Australia, found that those who simply resolved to think of the word “safe” whenever they saw a black face showed dramatic reductions in implicit racial bias.
Yeah, but they had shorter life expectancies. If an aversion to a particular group is based on fact and exprience, then it’s not prejudice. Learning to discard attitudes based on fact and experience might be politically correct, but it’s also stupid.
Posted by Gringo_Malo at 8:13 PM on May 7
Here are a few quotes that are amazing in their dishonesty:
“For instance, about two thirds of whites have an implicit preference for whites over blacks, whereas blacks show no average preference for one race over the other.”
This statement alone should be enough to make any thinking person question everything else in this article. It implies that blacks are somehow less prejudiced than other races. This despite the fact that any American either in school or on the job knows that blacks self segregate everywhere they go. The ones who don’t and try to make friends with whites are aggressively harassed for “not being black enough”. Unless they are hitting on white women and trying to get them pregnant to increase the power of their tribe and demonstrate their “superiority” through sexual humiliation of racially naive white women. Later in the article the author goes on to make another judgmental “blame unreasonable white prejudice” statement:
“Why might black faces, in particular, provoke vigilance? Northwestern University psychologist Jennifer A. Richeson speculates that American cultural stereotypes linking young black men with crime, violence and danger are so robust that our brains may automatically give preferential attention to blacks as a category, just as they do for threatening animals such as snakes.”
Crime statistics clearly show that young black men are more dangerous than snakes. Jesse Jackson is as nervous as your average white man when he looks behind him and sees young black males because he knows that they are a real danger. Again this is proven by any US crime statistics that you look at from any year and for any US city for the past 30 years. The bottom line is fear of young black males is a survival mechanism.
Maybe one day these utopian researchers will come up with a device that they can implant in every school child that will shock them if they have mental responses that run contrary to the orthodoxy of the social scientist. That way they can immediately punish our “thought crimes”.
Once again we see that the most dangerous threat to the white race is not blacks, hispanics or muslims. They are a “disease of the skin” and can be dealt with if things really fall apart by the time tested methods of Western dominance. The real threat, the “disease of the heart” are these liberal elite academics who every day strive to destroy the white race in their utopian pursuit of a truly “equal” society. These academic race traitors are going to destroy us.
Posted by Enough at 8:16 PM on May 7
“Implicit biases grow out of normal and necessary features of human cognition, such as our tendency to categorize, to form cliques and to absorb social messages and cues. To make sense of the world around us, we put things into groups and remember relations between objects and actions or adjectives: for instance, people automatically note that cars move fast, cookies taste sweet and mosquitoes bite. Without such deductions, we would have a lot more trouble navigating our environment and surviving in it.”
What is truly amazing about the above (and social psychology’s positions in general,) is that it is seen as healthy to “put things into groups and remember relations between objects and actions or adjectives,” in order to “make sense of the world around us,” but on the flipside that it is also somehow “abnormal” or “racist” for whites to do so with regard to nonwhites, in that same world? Never mind that national crime statistics clearly document that blacks and other nonwhites prey upon whites, at consistently higher rate then the reverse; or that nonwhites are seemingly compelled (by some “inexplicable” social mechanisms) to: scream “racism” at every unfavorable turn, orchestrate “hate crimes” against themselves, and demand governmental fiats for “equality,” in order to gain advantages against whites, all social ills and racial conflicts really do still boil down to whites’ “implicit biases,” and not nonwhites’ social pathologies and incongruities.
For a field that defined “cognitive dissonance”* and the “fundamental attribution error,”* social psychology and its practitioners sure seem to thrive while operating obliviously to their influences and constraints, when it comes to whites and “racism” or “prejudice.” Flawed research methodology, such as only measuring “white people’s brain activity as they viewed a series of white and black faces” for amygdala activity as was done in the Cunningham study; or assuming without question that blacks are actually and correctly more (and not prejudicially or mistakenly) attuned to whites’ nonverbal behavior in interracial interactions, as was done in Dovidio study, goes a long way to explaining such “inexplicable” phenomena for these “researchers.”
Whites are presumed to be “guilty” going into these so-called studies, blacks and other nonwhites are “excused” through “interpretations” of data favoring their positions or even biases, and all the uncomfortable or “dichotomous” results are thus made to fit neatly into a socio-politically preconceived outcome.
As always, God help us all!
*Cognitive dissonance is the theorized principle in social psychology, that when our beliefs do not match the world around us in reality, we experience psychological discomfort. The fundamental attribution error holds, that we attribute our own behaviors to environmental influences at a greater rate, than we do for our observations of others’ behaviors, which we view as being more influenced by internal and intrinsic influences.
Posted by John PM at 8:16 PM on May 7
For instance, about two thirds of whites have an implicit preference for whites over blacks, whereas blacks show no average preference for one race over the other.
BALONEY! As a teacher in a school that is nearly 50-50 black and White, the blacks are always known congregate with other blacks. Of course, there are a few “wannabes” on both sides, and they are quickly stigmatized by the own races. However, the blacks are more overtly critical of their own that “hang” with Whites than the other way around. I believe that people who find such statitic have never actually dealt with real black people before.
Posted by Sweet Charity at 8:24 PM on May 7
How typical of our anxiety- and guilt-ridden society that instead of just accepting the existence of such predispositions in our brains (if they in fact DO exist) as part of our life, and going on about our business, these top-lofty mental professionals find them as something evil and negative which we must strive to overcome. I have a message for them: It’s a part of human nature! It’s probably been this way since we came out of the caves and started seeing people who weren’t just like us! Get over it! It’s not necessarily a bad thing!
Posted by Wayne Engle at 9:18 PM on May 7
“There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life,” Jesse Jackson once told an audience, “than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery—then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.”
LOL! A rare candid moment from the reverend. When white people think this way, though, it’s racism.
Posted by generalquagmyer at 9:22 PM on May 7
So my brain is the problemo?
I must do what the voice in my head tells me to do…
Fortunately or unfortunately, the voice in my head is Desi Arnez of ‘I Love Lucy’…
The voice starts shouting about Lucy, then shifts over into shouting in Cuban. I don’t understand Cuban, so I don’t know what to do…
So now because I don’t understand Cuban, my brain is now a Bigot? I like Desi, but prefer my own kind because them I can understand. Bigot, smigot…
Posted by at 9:50 PM on May 7
Unconscious racial bias against those of other races develops at a very early stage in life and is likely genetically determined, as the ability to tell the difference between friend and foe is critical to survival and has a great deal of evolutionary value. The comment about blacks not having such genetic biases is either false or implies that black socialization introduces anti-white prejudice.
Posted by at 9:58 PM on May 7
Beside attempting to “scientifically” prove the obvious, the paper fails to look into the causes of this “prejudice”. It even attempts to distract the observant reader from asking such a question with naive, Soviet-like, speculations how to “improve” on human nature and eradicate prejudice from our mentality. (Quite a suicidal idea.)
And the fact is that not trusting those who don’t look like we is, generally, an adaptive strategy (one that increases individual’s chances to live long enough to reproduce), and what the article is trying to sell is that one should embrace a maladaptive strategy instead, just to be able to congratulate himself for not being a racist.
I can see how deeply this Soviet-style self-disapproval of one’s human nature has been implanted by the Liberal indoctrinators (euphemistically referred to as teachers and instructors) in young Americans’ minds by reading reports about millions of whites voting for Obama. I have absolutely no doubt that a majority of white Liberals who voted for him in the primaries did so just to self indulge themself with euphoria of being a non-racist, and provably so.
They had fun, made a point, and the country will suffer another fatal blow.
Posted by A Reader at 10:39 PM on May 7
“Study after study shows people are more comfortable around people like themselves.”
What is really amazing to me is that anybody needed a study to know this.
Somebody should do a study to determine why leftist academics are so foolish and ignorant. That would be far more interesting, to say nothing about how helpful it would be, because if we knew more about what went wrong with them we might be able to prevent the same condition in someone else.
Posted by Robert Kelly at 10:41 PM on May 7
Personally, I am more comfortable around people who are less inclined to beat, rob or murder me or my family
Posted by at 10:50 PM on May 7
Scientific American has been hopelessly politically correct for many years now. You’ll never see them publish an article on the heritability of IQ by Arthur Jensen.
Posted by WR the elder at 12:28 AM on May 8
So when do we open the reeducation camps and endure forced drugging?
Posted by ChiefofClanFearghus at 12:36 AM on May 8
Academic verbosity anyone? With due respect to these type studies/efforts.. aren’t we simply saying birds of a feather flock together? As well is it a mystery that higher cultures and standards of living have emminated from matching refinement in general human appearences physiogonomy’s? Higher cultures have evolved from higher evolved human types. Accordingly as people experience life they recognize the folly in being indescriminent with whom they associate. A typical reality is that virtually all white nations have dark people beating on their doors… and the reverse is not true.
Posted by Petrarch at 12:38 AM on May 8
Northwestern University psychologist Jennifer A. Richeson speculates that American cultural stereotypes linking young black men with crime, violence and danger
Stereotypes??? It’s just stereotypes linking black men with violence and danger? How about fact???
And why did the good doctor’s study only include white recations to blacks? How about how blacks to react to whites?
Posted by Alan at 1:23 AM on May 8
Science is the process of observing the environment, and drawing conclusions from that.
If a scientist observes that blacks attack whites 50 times more often than the reverse, how could he NOT conclude that he should be wary around blacks?
Posted by Aaron at 1:28 AM on May 8
” Implicit bias,” what a pile of mule dung. It is impossible to hate people you don`t know when there are so many great reasons to hate the people you do. This presupposes you are white or Asian.
Any sane person has an implicit bias against spitting cobras, the E-Bola virus, and black teen age boys in baggy pants heading your way.
One day some racist researcher will tackle the real problem in American race relations; the depth of hatred average blacks have for all things white. White psycologists can not see it or even accept it`s existance. It is like somebody living next to a nuclear power plant. They never see the danger only the pretty flowers growing out side the main gate.
Just go over the returns from North Carolina. 92% voted for the Mau Mau minister of tomorrow. These people knew that he has none of their values or even deep seated and beloved hatred of the white man. They did know that whites are freaked by him like we were O.J. They abandoned a woman who had done more for them than anyone since Eleanor Roosevelt.
Charles B. Tiffany
Kissimmee, Florida
Posted by Charles B. Tiffany at 6:00 AM on May 8
When people lived in tribes the ability to quickly tell who was in the tribe and who was not was a great help to survival. This is a natural human ability, and still helps in survival. It is not racist at all.
Posted by at 7:11 AM on May 8
This was my father’s belief
And this is also mine:
Let the corn be all one sheaf—
And the grapes be all one vine,
Ere our children’s teeth are set on edge
By bitter bread and wine.
“The Stranger” by Kipling
Posted by tusky at 8:20 AM on May 8
“Scientific American has been hopelessly politically correct for many years now.”
Scientific American, the Journal of why American Defense is impossible against the world?
My personal favorite was the article that mentioned that the Phalanx anti-aircraft and cruise missile system was only capable of a few minutes of continuous fire due to total ammo carried onboard. Excuse me, you don’t fire the 20mm cannon continously until you run out of ammo, you fire until a particular threat is neutralized!
Posted by at 8:49 AM on May 8
These psychologists are a bunch of quacks. They will change their tune to fit whatever the standard of the day requires without even blinking an eye. Whatever happened to the, “doll study,” where all the toddlers, Black and White, wanted to play with the White dolls?
Posted by Louis from Montreal at 9:21 AM on May 8
“Why might black faces, in particular, provoke vigilance? Northwestern University psychologist Jennifer A. Richeson speculates that American cultural stereotypes linking young black men with crime, violence and danger are so robust that our brains may automatically give preferential attention to blacks as a category, just as they do for threatening animals such as snakes.”
—
The suspect in the slaying of convenience store clerk Jennifer Olson was described as a garter snake, about two feet long, last seen wearing a only skinny black tube sock with three long yellow stripes.
What planet are these people from?!?!?!
Posted by at 11:04 AM on May 8
“Study after study shows people are more comfortable around people like themselves.”
What is really amazing to me is that anybody needed a study to know this.
The holy grail of multiculturalism is to find the key to making different people love each other. What frustrates the lefts effort is the innate aspect of all animals to be drawn to their own kind.
Forcing people into close proximity through integration and other feel-good programs hasn’t worked. The theory from social science was that all we had to do was mix and mingle and we’d discover our common humanity. On the contrary, what happened is that living and working together has made us see how different and incompatilbe we are.
So we end up with hand-ringing articles like this one struggling to understand why their theories of racial integration have failed.
My guess is that these people aren’t going to leave it alone and say, ‘all animals prefer to be in the company of their own kind’. It’s likely they’re going to define innate animal nature as somehow anti-social or ant-human rights. It’s long been argued by extremist on the left that ‘racism’ and ‘bigotry’ were akin to mental illnesses. This is where I see this research going.
There may come a day when noticing the difference between males and females is defined as a hate-thought.
Posted by sbuffalonative at 11:07 AM on May 8
That “Bigot in your brain” that the Scienterrific Americano warns you about, is only trying to KEEP YOU ALIVE. Previous poster “Enough” put it well: “The bottom line is that fear of young black males is a survival mechanism.”
In fact, if not for bigot in the brains of your ancestors — which kept THEM alive long enough to reproduce — hostile forces would have wiped out your family line long ago. And you, therefore, would never have been born.
I have a bigot in my brain. We have an excellent relationship, my inner-bigot and I. I feed him every day, and take him for long walks to keep him healthy. And he, in return, keeps me from venturing into dangerous neighborhoods, or giving away my hard-earned money to those who would displace me, or other counterinstinctual foolishness.
My bigot. I think I’ll keep him.
Posted by The Notorious B.I.G.O.T. at 11:44 AM on May 8
“…In real college classrooms, students taking a course on prejudice reduction who had a black professor showed greater reductions in both implicit and explicit prejudice at the end of the semester than did those who had a white professor…”
And there go teaching jobs for white people.
Posted by at 2:06 PM on May 8
That “Bigot in your brain” that the Scienterrific Americano warns you about, is only trying to KEEP YOU ALIVE. Previous poster “Enough” put it well: “The bottom line is that fear of young black males is a survival mechanism.”
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Exactly. It’s just like having a fear of high places or deep water. Mother Nature gave you that healthy fear for a purpose. You’re not a scaredy-cat, you’re listening to your survival instincts.
Anyone who’s cooing into your ear that you shouldn’t be a wimp, and that there’s no reason to be afraid of cliffs, and that you’re just a mentally sick victim of an irrational prejudice, is most definitely NO FRIEND OF YOURS. Dump him! He’s out to destroy you. He means you no good.
Posted by browser at 2:32 PM on May 8
“These psychologists are a bunch of quacks. They will change their tune to fit whatever the standard of the day requires”
Posted by Louis from Montreal
And they call this: “SCIENTIFIC” American?
Posted by voter at 2:57 PM on May 8
“Scientific American has been hopelessly politically correct for many years now. You’ll never see them publish an article on the heritability of IQ by Arthur Jensen.”
Posted by WR the elder
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I guess so!
I applied for a job with them years ago. I recall that a colored woman there, who was in charge of hiring, gave me a written test to do — vocabluary, math, and such —and left me alone for a few minutes. I finished it quickly. They were so easy! I just went down the list and went check, check check.
When she stopped back to look in on me, I was just sitting there. She said, with a touch of annoyance in her voice, “Don’t stop now! Keep going! Go on to the next page. Finish as many as you can.” I said, “I did. I did them all.” She said (now sounding very skeptical), “Lemme see that!” and took the paper. She said, “You did!” … then added “Well, just wait ‘till I check this”, with a smirk, still sounding very skeptical that I got any of them right.
I got ALL of them right. A perfect 100%.
Bottom line: For some reason, I still didn’t get the job. I guess I lacked sufficient language skills to work for such a prestigious magazine.
Posted by browser at 3:25 PM on May 8
“For instance, about two thirds of whites have an implicit preference for whites over blacks, whereas blacks show no average preference for one race over the other.”
The European psychology explains this matter easy. While whites look in their relations with people an opportunity to live, work and build together; there is no difference for blacks who to rob and who to rape.
Posted by at 4:39 PM on May 8
What’s being described, in about two thousand too many words, is the attic of human experience. A collection of direct or indirect forewarning assumptions about other human types, which are simply the personal retentions of a human being automatically looking out for their own welfare.
Posted by Gary at 4:59 PM on May 8
“Blacks show no preference for their race”,,,,,,,
GIVE ME A BREAK!!!!!!! Blacks self-segregate themselves EVERYWHERE they are and go.
Posted by at 7:42 PM on May 8
A popular saying around D.C. is, “Tell me what you want to prove and I’ll conduct a study to support it.”
Posted by Ranger at 7:58 PM on May 8
The new psychology of leadership sounds like brainwashing and soulcrushing at the same time. How convenient.
Posted by Lars at 8:32 PM on May 8
It’s important not to forget that in the circles these psychologists inhabit the merest hint of an awareness of the danger blacks pose would result in instant exile for the hinter. Anyone aspiring to join or remain in the establishment in America, be it the scientific establishment, the academic establishment, the corporate establishment, or any other branch you can think of, must never ever speak candidly of this matter for the result would be instant career death. Therefore there will NEVER be a candid public airing of the mismatch between blacks and civilized first world standards of performance and behavior. It is verboten.
Posted by ricpic at 9:54 PM on May 8
The holy grail of multiculturalism is to find the key to making different people love each other. What frustrates the lefts effort is the innate aspect of all animals to be drawn to their own kind.
Forcing people into close proximity through integration and other feel-good programs hasn’t worked. The theory from social science was that all we had to do was mix and mingle and we’d discover our common humanity.
sbuffalonative
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In the streetcars of Geneva (Switzerland) and all over the city, there are posters exhorting the populace to: “Say ‘Yes!’ to Diversity”. [Disons “Oui” à la diversité!]
Who is mounting this campaign? And how much does it cost? Who is paying for it? Why is it necessary? (And btw, where is all this terrible “racism” that they’re constantly fighting? I don’t see any manifestations of it anywhere.)
Does it occur to anyone that if an eager welcoming of “our common humanity” (as put above) were truly the natural thing, then this incessant barrage of expensive propaganda would not be necessary? Why try to sell people on a thing that is only natural in the first place? After all, there are no posters urging us to remember to breathe or sleep or eat. No posters remind us to drink some liquid when we’re thirsty. Hence, the proof that this is an unnatural thing which is being imposed on us by those who have an agenda. A hidden agenda.
Posted by ghw at 12:38 AM on May 9
So if I see a couple in their 80s should I NOT assume they’re partiers and going to get “smashed” and “buzzed”? If I see a fat person, should I not assume that he can’t run really fast?
Posted by at 1:06 AM on May 9
When people lived in tribes the ability to quickly tell who was in the tribe and who was not was a great help to survival. This is a natural human ability, and still helps in survival. It is not racist at all.
Posted by at 7:11 AM on May 8
I think it’s tribalism-not racism. To me racism, is killing or consciously hating someone because they’re not like you. Tribalism is just as you pointed out. It seems whites are the only ones who bought into the notion that it’s “racist” to stick to your own kind
Posted by at 1:08 AM on May 9
The holy grail of multiculturalism is to find the key to making different people love each other. What frustrates the lefts effort is the innate aspect of all people to be drawn to their own kind.
Well, the liberals failed (and still do) with other types of equality like communism or socialism, and multiculturalism is the next “equality” agenda to pursue. When will they quit experimenting with our money and lives?
Posted by at 1:45 PM on May 9
Northwestern University psychologist Jennifer A. Richeson speculates that American cultural stereotypes linking young black men with crime, violence and danger are so robust that our brains may automatically give preferential attention to blacks as a category, just as they do for threatening animals such as snakes
The eight-hundred pound gorilla in the room: stereotypes are all basically true. They are the result of readily observable fact and individual personal experience, not the machinations of evil racists with an agenda of hate. Hence, a stereotype such as Chinese Illiterates or Irish Puritans would probably be a hard sell.
For instance, about two thirds of whites have an implicit preference for whites over blacks, whereas blacks show no average preference for one race over the other.
This little gem of intellectual vacancy has been blasted enough times already on this thread, so I’ll simply offer another way they might test it:
I’ll give the authors of this study a lift into Baltimore, and drop them off at the corner of North and Hilton. From there they can proceed on foot eastbound, and I’ll be waiting for them at the corner of North and Charles. If they can make it that far, still holding this idiotic belief, I’ll reconsider its merits. I doubt they’d make it that far at all.
Posted by BW Sam at 5:27 PM on May 9
Reportedly Ms Richeson was abandoned by her parents because they wanted a black baby, what an irony!
Posted by Lars at 7:37 PM on May 9
When people lived in tribes the ability to quickly tell who was in the tribe and who was not was a great help to survival. This is a natural human ability, and still helps in survival.
Posted by at 7:11 AM
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I think it’s tribalism — not racism. To me, racism is killing or consciously hating someone because they’re not like you.
Posted by at 1:08 AM
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Well, that’s not what racism means to me! I think you have fallen for the meaning that the Left wants you to think it means. I am a “racist” meaning only that I care about my race and kin — just like a nationalist cares about his nation. I do not wish to kill, nor do I consciously hate anyone. That’s nonsense.
Is it wicked or shameful to be a patriot? Why should it be wicked and shameful to be a racist? (Answer: because those who manipulate our ideas have made it that way.)
Furthermore, racism, and nationalism are just extended forms of tribalism. They’re all the same basic survival instinct. It runs in this order: self; family; tribe; nation; race; species. All of them are healthy concerns, geared to survival. Anyone who tells you otherwise means you no good and has an agenda to serve. Trust your own instrincts, not what someone else tells you.
Posted by browser at 10:16 PM on May 9
“…whereas blacks show no average preference for one race over the other….”
Lie: Blacks, far more than any other group, SELF-segregate, in every sphere of life. Look at any school cafeteria. Look at the plethora of explicitly black-only organizations.
“Scientific American” long ago lost any semblance of being “scientific”: It has for decades been run by leftists who use it as a propaganda organ for leftwing propaganda. Every issue during the ‘80’s would contain some article that missle defense was impossible. Not one article that it was. It went hysterical in response to the “Bell Curve”. There were even attacks by name on Rush Limbaugh.
I finally had enough and cancelled my subscription.
Another example of how even science is being corrupted by leftwing activists.
Posted by at 10:43 PM on May 9
The statement “For instance, about two thirds of whites have an implicit preference for whites over blacks, whereas blacks show no average preference for one race or the other” shows just exactly how clueless the author is and voids the whole article.
This article is just another Marxist left wing attempt at making the white race feel guilty about everything, even their thoughts, while all other races are nothing but “angels” in comparison. Obviously Siri Carpenter doesn’t read the news, has never been in the streets, and has no concept of reality or she could never make the above statement along with other statements in her article that were just as clueless.
As a college graduate all she knows is the left wing liberal agenda that has been drilled into her head day after day by supposed institutes of higher learning where any debate on any subject that goes against the liberal communist agenda is forbidden. Although it’s not her fault for being brainwashed you would think earning a Ph.D. would warrant doing a little more research into the real world that we live in. Attending Yale University explains a lot.
Posted by Gerry at 12:46 PM on May 10
“As a college graduate all she knows is the left wing liberal agenda that has been drilled into her head day after day by supposed institutes of higher learning where any debate on any subject that goes against the liberal communist agenda is forbidden.” — Gerry
Nowadays, being a college graduate just means being a graduate of brainwashing camp. Having a Ph.D. means the brainwashing has been done even more thoroughly.
I wonder what sort of a name “Siri” Carpenter is. Is she a black woman? Sounds like she could be to me. If so, that’s all the more reason why the brainwashing took hold. It was layered on over an attitude that probably was already there and just confirmed her already-held prejudices. And she’s writing about other people’s prejudices and stereotypes!
Posted by at 3:59 PM on May 10
