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

Why Do So Many Studies Fail to Replicate? – The New York Times

Over the last two semesters, our lab, the Peace and Justice Psychology Lab, has tried to replicate a finding from a 2007 article (Sommers & Norton, 2007) that showed a racial bias in excluding jurors during jury selection. They showed that black potential jurors were struck from jury selection more than white jurors, a finding that generalized from college students to law students and to attorneys. This finding matched the findings of a report issued last year that documented race bias in jury selection in Louisiana over the last decade.

We contacted Dr. Sommers to ask about his methods, and had a good conversation with him. One of the comments he made was that we needed to pilot test our juror profiles extensively to find ones that were effective in making the jurors undesirable. We did that (but only tested four different profiles). We asked him for the images he used in his study, but it was a long time ago and he couldn’t find his exact materials.

So, we set about selecting juror images from a database of facial images – one black and one white – that were matched on gender, age, expression, attractiveness, etc. We settled on two images of middle-aged women.

The replication failed spectacularly: There was no difference between the rates of striking black and white jurors. If we want to interpret our finding optimistically, we might say that students at Southern Arkansas University are impervious to racial bias. Realistically, I believe the replication failed because the materials were not identical. That tells us that the effect has something to do with factors other than race. For example, it is possible that Sommers & Norton used images that were not matched on attractiveness, and the black juror’s image simply was less attractive. Sommers used male juror profiles and images, and there is a pervasive (replicated) effect that black men are typically viewed as more threatening than white men by research subjects, which may not have affected our participants’ impressions of the female jurors. If we replicated with male jurors, we might get the same effect.

The one finding we did get was that people high in Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) (which is a preference for hierarchical power structures, traditional social roles, and status quo among other things) struck the jurors (of both races) at a higher rate than those low in SDO. I believe that this reflects a gender role preference consistent with SDO. To wit, the jurors were women, middle aged, with no children, who had advanced degrees and a job as journalist. This may violate the gender roles that our culture typically assigns to women as homemakers, child bearers, etc., and those high in SDO might be more sensitive to this violation of social roles and want to “punish” the women. We have not directly tested this hypothesis, and I am not sure we will try.

I was motivated to blog about this because the social psychologist Jay Van Bavel wrote an opinion piece for this Sunday’s New York Times about the replication crisis. He addresses the difficulty with conducting direct replications of previous findings in social psychology because of the effect of context: there are lots of factors going on in the social environment that may be related to whether a replication fails or succeeds. But, I think that helps us understand that the effect is not as robust as only one, unreplicated, research finding might suggest.

Because it is hard to recreate the exact conditions of the original research.

Source: Why Do So Many Studies Fail to Replicate? – The New York Times

Sommers, S. R., & Norton, M. I. (2007). Race-based judgments, race-neutral justifications: Experimental examination of peremptory use and the Batson challenge procedure. Law and Human Behavior, 31, 261–273.

Threat and Prejudice and Moral Exclusion, Oh My!

This is why I do the research I do on the power of perceived threat in prejudice and moral exclusion:

Ken Knight, 54, a heating and cooling technician from Florence, S.C., said he agrees with Bush and Cruz that only Christian refugees should be let into the country.”I wouldnt bring the Muslims. They cut your head off. You cant trust them. Im sure there are good ones, but theyre like the mob. Once you get in, you cant trust them,” he said after a church service

I want to understand that strange thought process.

And, of course, Christians and terrorists are mutually exclusive, aren’t they?

Link to the article: Cruz: ‘No meaningful risk’ of Christians committing terrorism – The Washington Post.

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.

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.

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.