We’re All a Little Biased, Even if We Don’t Know It

The NY Times has a good article that addresses a recent event in the Vice Presidential Debate. When Tim Kaine raised the issue of implicit bias in institutional racism, Mike Pence took serious offense to it as a condemnation of law enforcement officers.

Many people hear “implicit bias” as academic jargon for “racist.” But the reality is more complicated.

The issue of implicit bias is that all of us, law enforcement and non-law enforcement, white and black, absorb notions of racial power structures from the dominant culture and, without awareness, our behavior is affected by it.

To broach implicit bias isn’t to impugn someone’s values; it’s to recognize that our values compete on an unconscious level with all the stereotypes we absorb from the world around us. And even black police officers aren’t immune to internalizing them.

That’s why it’s implicit (non conscious) and not explicit (consciously aware) bias. The concept has been soundly demonstrated in psychological research.

 implicit bias is just one of many psychological processes that shape how we interact with one another. We also tend to be better at remembering the faces of people in our own racial group, or to subconsciously favor people in our group.

This is one reason that when I grade written assignments, I always do it anonymously. I cannot trust that I do not have implicit biases on the basis of age, gender, race, etc. If I might (non-consciously) believe that a particular group might perform worse on an assignment, I need to guard against letting that influence affect the grade I assign a student. That is the benefit of learning about implicit bias: knowing that we are subject to influences outside our awareness and making every effort to guard against them.

Source: We’re All a Little Biased, Even if We Don’t Know It

Hillary Clinton’s ‘Angry’ Face – The New York Times

The NY Times has an interesting article applying social psychology to the present election, the first between a woman and man as President of the Unites States of America.

It illustrates the strength of a bias we have to attribute emotional causes to women’s actions, but more situational causes to men’s. It is sort of a “gendered fundamental attribution error.”

The author’s research has shown this basic effect, and it may be at work when we perceive Hillary Clinton being serious as more “angry” but Donald Trump as more “forceful.” It also may be part of people’s attributions of her as more untrustworthy.

This is a classic example of a psychological phenomenon that my lab has studied: how people perceive emotion differently in men’s and women’s faces. It’s something for Americans to consider as they watch the first debate between Mrs. Clinton and Donald J. Trump on Monday.

Source: Hillary Clinton’s ‘Angry’ Face – The New York Times

Weight stigma negatively impacts mental and physical health

We talked about weight stigma in General Psychology a week or so ago. A good article in the NY Times illustrates the depth of the problem. A new study by a social psychology graduate student, Jeffrey Hunger, at UC Santa Barbara finds:

those who were overweight or obese were more likely to report problems like depression, anxiety, substance abuse and low self-esteem if they had experienced weight-based discrimination in the past.

It also includes a quote from a professor of popular culture, Courtney Bailey:

fat stigma intensified after 9/11, when Americans’ sense of vulnerability translated into increased animosity toward the fat body

This echoes some research we did in Mark Shcaller’s lab at UBC where it was found that perceived vulnerability to disease was correlated with anti-fat prejudice.

Link to the article: Is Fat Stigma Making Us Miserable? – The New York Times.

Justice and Bias, Mental Health and Poverty, Oh My!

Two recent opinion pieces provide some interesting perspective on topics we have discussed recently in Social Psychology class: implicit bias and social drift. Implicit bias is the ways we are influenced to judge other people based on baises we are completely unaware of. It has influence in many areas of law and decision making from police shootings to suspect lineups to jury and judge decisions. Adam Benforado is a law professor at Drexel University:

With the aid of psychology, we see there’s a whole host of seemingly extraneous forces influencing behavior and producing systematic distortions. But they remain hidden because they don’t fit into our familiar legal narratives.

via Flawed Humans, Flawed Justice – NYTimes.com.

We also talked about social drift in Abnormal Psychology. Nicholas Christof has an excellent opinion piece summarizing a lot of research on the relationships between poverty and mental health (among other health problems):

If you’re battling mental health problems, or grow up with traumas like domestic violence (or seeing your brother shot dead), you’re more likely to have trouble in school, to self-medicate with drugs or alcohol, to have trouble in relationships.“There’s a strong association between poverty and low mental health,” notes Johannes Haushofer, a psychologist at Princeton University.

A second line of research has shown that economic stress robs us of cognitive bandwidth. Worrying about bills, food or other problems, leaves less capacity to think ahead or to exert self-discipline. So, poverty imposes a mental tax.

via It’s Not Just About Bad Choices – NYTimes.com.

The benefits of heuristics and impulse decisions

The NY Times has a very good article illustrating the benefits of heuristic decision making processes over algorithmic ones. In this case, the author is talking about how long he spends making purchasing decisions. This is very familiar to me.

the time I spend overanalyzing prices will cost me way more money, in the form of opportunity costs and cognitive drain, than I could ever hope to save.

We generally believe that the best decisions come from examining all options and making a decision based on all available evidence. But, this evidence gathering comes at a cost: in this case, the personal resources (financial and otherwise) that are spent making the decision.

We need to accept that we can’t always make the best decisions, but we can make good ones. Generally, good decisions will make the most of our resources and free us to move on to other important things.

In cognitive complexity theory, one of the things we drive home is the idea that the situation might determine the maximum amount of complex thinking we can apply to a problem. For example, consider how the US might respond to another massive terrorist attack (or attack from another nation). When deciding whether to go to war or not, we can use more complexity if making a decision in the weeks or months before we are under attack, but in the case of a surprise attack, that kind of complex thinking could take lots of time and resources, two things we are desperately short of in the midst of an attack. In that case, taking the time and resources necessary to consider all the options (high complexity) might result in a slow response and the likelihood of more attacks, versus using heuristics and considering fewer options (lower complexity) which might allow a rapid response to avert another attack.

Link to the article: Getting Over Cold Feet: The Case for Impulse Buying – NYTimes.com.

Jennifer Eberhardt on her research and its implications for police violence against blacks

The NY Times has a good interview with social psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt on her research and how it illustrates some underlying principles that might have been at work in the recent cases of excessive police violence directed at African Americans. The take-home message is that only through awareness of our unconscious biases can we hope to overcome the tendency to treat groups differently.

One thing I do is work with police departments. We do workshops where we present these studies and show what implicit bias is, and how it’s different from old-fashioned racism. I don’t think this alone can change behavior. But it can help people become aware of the unconscious ways race operates. If you combine that with other things, there is hope.

Link to the NY Times article: A MacArthur Grant Winner Tries to Unearth Biases to Aid Criminal Justice – NYTimes.com.

Getting involved in research as an undergrad

SPSP (Society for Personality and Social Psychology) published a brief primer on getting involved in research as an undergraduate. It’s worth checking out:

Link to the article at SPSP.org.

Fast food and impatience

In Social Psychology last semester, we read a paper by Zhong & DaVoe* that showed a causal relationship between exposure to fast food logos (as opposed to local sit-down restaurant logos) and impatience through a number of measures. Today Sanford DaVoe published an interesting Op-Ed in the NY Times where he reviews some archival and survey data analysis that shows this effect might be present not only in the lab but in the “real” world, and may affect our well-being. He concludes:

our research highlights the need to think more explicitly about the subtle cues in our everyday living environment. Put differently, one important step you can take to nudge yourself toward being more patient would be to live in a neighborhood that doesn’t constantly bombard you with reminders of instant gratification.

I have a bit of a problem with that last sentence. While some of us have such choices through the benefits of structural inequalities, many do not. As we covered in Stereotyping and Prejudice this semester, the choice of where we live is largely determined by socioeconomic factors including race and its correlate, income.

In addition, television is the major force bombarding us with these reminders; that crosses neighborhood boundaries. Thus, I would call for restrictions or bans on public advertisements for fast food. However, such a public health initiative might not go over well with the more conservative parts of our legislative bodies. Remember that conservativism is correlated with individualism and Protestant Work Ethic which would imply that it is not the environment but rather the individual weaknesses of people who are susceptible to such advertisements.

Round and around, that’s the way things go. — Lucy Kaplansky

Link to “Big Mac, Thin Wallet”, the Op-Ed in the NY Times

* Reference: Zhong, C., & DeVoe, S. E. (2010). You are how you eat: Fast food and impatience.Psychological Science, 21 (5), 619–622. Available here, or here as a PDF.

Business, the Internet, and Discrimination

It appears that some online merchants are committing a form of organizational discrimination through their pricing practices. People in lower-income areas are paying more for products than those in higher-income areas. As we know, neighborhood, income, and race are correlated, and so African Americans, Latinos, and other minorities could be generally paying more (along with their low-wage white counterparts). This remains to be investigated.

The pricing scheme was investigated recently by the Wall Street Journal along with researcher Ashkan Soltani. See the article here.

Some quotes:

A Wall Street Journal investigation found that the Staples Inc. website displays different prices to people after estimating their locations.

The Journal identified several companies, including Staples, Discover Financial Services, Rosetta Stone Inc. and Home Depot Inc., that were consistently adjusting prices

The Journal tested to see whether price was tied to different characteristics including population, local income, proximity to a Staples store, race and other demographic factors. Statistically speaking, by far the strongest correlation involved the distance to a rival’s store from the center of a ZIP Code. That single factor appeared to explain upward of 90% of the pricing pattern.

In the Journal’s examination of Staples’ online pricing, the weighted average income among ZIP Codes that mostly received discount prices was roughly $59,900, based on Internal Revenue Service data. ZIP Codes that saw generally high prices had a lower weighted average income, $48,700.

On the methodology:

The differences found on the Staples website presented a complex pricing scheme. The Journal simulated visits to Staples.com from all of the more than 42,000 U.S. ZIP Codes, testing the price of a Swingline stapler 20 times in each. In addition, the Journal tested more than 1,000 different products in 10 selected ZIP Codes, 10 times in each location.

The Journal saw as many as three different prices for individual items. How frequently a simulated visitor saw low and high prices appeared to be tied to the person’s ZIP Code. Testing suggested that Staples tries to deduce people’s ZIP Codes by looking at their computer’s IP address. This can be accurate, but isn’t foolproof.

Sherif’s Robbers Cave Experiments on ABC’s Radio National

Courtesy ABC

The blog Advances in the History of Psychology pointed me toward an Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio show covering the now-famous Robbers Cave experiments conducted by Muzafer Sherif and his colleagues. It includes fascinating audio from the experiments, interviews with adults who were the boys at the camps, interviews with one of the experimenters (OJ Harvey), etc. It raises some significant ethical issues, as well as some methodological issues. Highly recommended if you’re into social psychology.

Link to the ABC show web page to listen to it.