stereotypes – Psychology and More

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

Personalizing Mental Illness

In Stereotyping and Prejudice, we just finished studying stigma, and mental illness is heavily stigmatized. A recent article in the NY Times is about a project to use oral history to help personalize the experience of mental illness. As we studied, the more you can provide individuating information, the more stereotypes can be weakened in person perception.

One thing I learned was that as soon as you mentioned the word, people stopped seeing the person. They just saw the diagnosis and a collection of symptoms.

Link to the article in the NY Times Well blog.

Some links from my students

I have great students in Social Cognition and Stereotyping and Prejudice. They engage with the class material deeply and connect it to their everyday experience. They often comment about how much they see different forms of social cognitive processes and stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination all around them that they hadn’t seen before taking the class.

They have sent me some links to material online that I thought I’d share.

In Stereotyping and Prejudice, we have been studying prejudice and hate groups. One student sent a link to a page exploring the head of the Arkansas white supremacist organization, who lives in Little Rock’s “Heights” neighborhood, an area of relatively affluent “old money.” An interesting irony is that one of the photos shown from the organization’s Facebook page was of a birthday party at a local pizza restaurant, where all of the members were engaged in the Nazi salute. The ironic part is that the birday party was for a child (shown in a wheelchair) who is disabled. Such individuals were condemned to death under the Nazi regime in Germany as a threat to the integrity of the Aryan race. Click here for the page about the leader, and here for a page from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum describing the Nazi’s extermination of disabled individuals.

In Social Cognition, we recently covered ironic processes of mental control, and the fact that the more we focus on suppressing a thought, the more likely it is to affect our behavior. A student sent a link to a commercial for Expedia that illustrates it. Click here for the commercial.

Click here for a Buzzfeed page (inspired by something similar at Harvard) about the experience of stereotyping and prejudice experienced by students (usually of color) at Oxford University who are commonly assumed to have some “exotic” or foreign experience that makes them different/got them admission/etc.

A student sent a link to a video showing some children’s reaction to a recent Cheerios commercial that apparently cause some consternation among adults about it’s portrayal of an interracial family. Click here for the video.

We were discussing affirmative action and a student sent this:
This photo is what I was thinking of for our discussion of affirmative action last week.
http://i236.photobucket.com/albums/ff112/DeeOlive/toon2.jpg
Also this is an interesting website.
http://www.understandingrace.com/home.html

Apparently on campus there was a bit of an uproar over a party that was planned by some students and to which the entire campus was invited. The theme was implicitly racist, and so it naturally caused some consternation. I assume the students who did the planning didn’t realize the implicit racism in the concept:

“So, surprising news. Kind of gossip, but it pertains to class. The entire student body has been invited to a party named “Thugs n’ Kisses” and I don’t think I would see the perpetual racism of it if I hadn’t been in class. Students of all kinds are currently revolting. But I was just going to let you know.”

I sent the student a link to an article on how Halloween costumes represent racist ideology, implicitly and explicitly. Click here for access to the article. Here’s a link to another interesting page on a class project based on that article.

A student sent this link to an “experiment” (not really) that illustrated how attribution might be different for whites or blacks in terms of crime.