How Kids Learn Prejudice

In class this week, we were discussing observational learning (AKA social learning) and then moved into cognition and the formation of stereotypes. Children are constantly observing the behavior of adult models in their environment and learning behaviors from them.

The NY Times has a good article written by a social psychologist on the ways children learn social attitudes and prejudice. She argues (well, I think) that the candidacy (and potential presidency) of Donald Trump may have some deleterious effects on children’s social attitudes and behaviors.

Also at stake are the attitudes Mr. Trump’s discourse would transmit to a generation of children.

Source: How Kids Learn Prejudice

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

Inside Venezuela’s Crumbling Mental Hospitals

The state-run El Pampero Hospital in Venezuela has almost no drugs left for its tormented patients, let alone food and clothing, amid the nation’s economic crisis.

The New York Times has an excellent photo spread illustrating the horrific conditions in Venezuela’s mental “health” system.

In the beginning of the semester, we talked about the horrible conditions in asylums from the middle ages until the advent of the moral therapy movement. Things were still pretty bad until the development of psychotropic drugs that could treat the symptoms of mental illness.

Because Venezuela’s national economy is in the dumps, medication is not purchased for the hospital and the patients are floridly symptomatic. It is truly a nightmare, and a good reminder of how far we have come in treating mental illness.

The worst part is:

The Venezuelan government denies that its public hospitals are suffering from shortages, and has refused multiple offers of international medical aid.

Source: Inside Venezuela’s Crumbling Mental Hospitals

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

Using behavioral science research to improve public policy

What use is psychology research? The Social and Behavioral Sciences Team has just released their second report. This is the result of the President’s executive order to direct federal agencies to use behavioral and social science research to improve operations.

Here are a few results:

SBST pilots led to a 53 percent increase in workplace savings plan enrollment rates by military service members and resulted in more than 4,800 new enrollments and over $1 million dollars in additional savings in just one month; a 63 percent increase in the rate at which small family farmers obtained small-business loans; and a doubling in the rate at which student loan borrowers in default contacted default-resolution representatives.

Link to the report page: 2016 Annual Report | Social and Behavioral Sciences Team

Depression Is Poorly Diagnosed and Often Goes Untreated – The New York Times

One of the topics discussed in our Abnormal Psychology class is the merits of general physicians (as opposed to psychiatrists) prescribing psychoactive drugs for psychological disorders.

The NY Times has a good summary of results from a national survey that confirms the prevalence of depression in the general population, but also the low rates of treatment. Conversely, general physicians are treating individuals for depression with antidepressant drugs without administering the simplest of screening measures.

This calls for greater education of physicians about the inpirtance of using the screening before going straight to medication. On the other hand, physicians have incentives to use medication immediately: potential malpractice if the patient does have the disorder and the physician did not treat it, and simply the negative social (and business) implications of refusing to treat a person who insists. It is a complicated issue.

About 8.4 percent of the people interviewed had depression. But of those, only 28.7 percent had received any treatment. At the same time, of those who were treated for depression, only 29.9 percent had screened positive for the disorder. Many people with less serious psychological problems were being treated with antidepressants and other psychiatric medicines.

Source: Depression Is Poorly Diagnosed and Often Goes Untreated – The New York Times

What Should You Choose: Time or Money? – The New York Times

even when we held constant the amount of leisure time and money respondents had (as well as their age, gender, marital status, parental status and the extent to which they valued material possessions), the people who chose time over money were still happier.

This article in the NY Times is relevant to the Careers in Psychology course that I teach. We fairly often focus on money (i.e., annual income) at the exclusion of time (i.e., family togetherness). One reason is that money is easily quantifiable whereas time is less easily quantifiable. One of the points in this article is that money is a finite resource, whereas time seems infinite. But what if you quantify the finite nature of time?

I think that is one thing that aging trends to do: focuses our attention on the finite nature of time on the planet; thus, time may have the same or more value than money.

So, to the degree that we remind people of the finite nature of time, would it make money a less attractive option? For example, we might have people calculate the finite number of Saturdays we have left, versus simply imagine what they might do on Saturdays in the future, and measure their desire to make money working on the weekend. If they are made conscious of the finite number of Saturdays, their desire to work on Saturday might be reduced.

Source: What Should You Choose: Time or Money? – The New York Times

Why We Should Stop Grading Students on a Curve – The New York Times

Takers believe in a zero-sum world, and they end up creating one where bosses, colleagues and clients don’t trust them. Givers build deeper and broader relationships — people are rooting for them instead of gunning for them.

I am catching up on some reading from the New York Times, so I’ll be making some quick posts here.

I have a colleague who was talking about academic motivation one day. He proposed that students see the class as a competition, with a winner and a lot of losers. I had never seen my classes that way; to me, everyone could be winners.

So I surveyed my class one day to see how many believed achievement in class was a competition, and how many didn’t. Only one-third of them saw it as a competition. I was relieved by that. But also I encourage students to form study groups, work together on their online quizzes, etc. It may very well be the zeitgeist that the professor sets up that creates either competition or cooperation.

There was an article on this in the NY Times. The author is a business professor and he says that in business schools the zeitgeist is generally one of completion with your classmates. He was disturbed by this and describes how he went about changing that zeitgeist by encouraging cooperation.

The quote above also relates to my research on peace and conflict. I believe that there are some people who generally have what I would call a “zero-sum orientation” where they generally see intergroup (and perhaps even interpersonal) relations as a zero-sum game: one where there is a winner, and by definition only one winner; if I win you must lose.

There have been several papers that tie zero-sum beliefs to intergroup relations, but thus far it seems no one has developed a good measure for zero-sum beliefs. Usually these measures have included a few questions to tap this orientation, but the internal reliability is often marginal at best (e.g., Ho, Sidanius, Pratto, Levin, Thomsen, Kteily, & Sheehy-Skeffington, 2012). There have also been articles looking at zero-sum beliefs within a particular domain, such as racism (e.g., Norton & Sommers, 2011).

I believe it may be a good time to consider developing a valid and reliable zero-sum orientation scale as a basic test of either trait or state zero-sum beliefs.

Source: Why We Should Stop Grading Students on a Curve – The New York Times

Mentally ill inmate who spent 1,001 days in solitary confinement now feels alone outside

The Miami Herald has an interesting article about one recently released inmate who spent nearly his entire three year term in solitary. Worse yet, he had mental illnesses that were exacerbated by solitary.

In Abnormal Psychology we were discussing the effects of deinstitutionalization and the shift to community care, but the lack of community care shifting mental illness to the streets. Another big location that people with mental illness wind up is prison. The article makes the point that community mental health services are underfunded and lacking. We see the cost here.

Devon Davis was one of more than 2,000 North Carolina inmates released each year after being imprisoned with a mental illness. He is one of hundreds released directly from solitary confinement within a state prison. They emerge from a cell roughly the size of a parking space into a world they sometimes know little about.

Source: Mentally ill inmate who spent 1,001 days in solitary confinement now feels alone outside | Miami Herald