Isaac Butler from a recent comments thread drops some science on perceptions of race:
Basically, our brains have evolved to do an enormous amount of automatic processing of and reacting to simuli and life experience. They do this through a few different processes, but they mainly involve creating cateogories, associations between these categories and what get are called “schema,” which are essentially stories our brain tells itself without our conscious knowledge.
The associations and stories we have often involve categories of people, which we call stereotyping (it doesn’t have a negative connotation in psych circles). A lot of stereotyping is harmless. How do you know without having to think about it that a large, bald, fat human that’s crying probably doesn’t need a diaper change but a tiny, bald, fat human does? How do you know that a black rectangle that rings is a phone and not a wallet? it’s all these kinds of processes.
Anyway, not all of our associations are harmless or value neutral, often they involve preferences (when they’re positive) or biases (when they’re negative) about people in certain groups. Simply put, we have a story about them in our heads that we do not realize we have.
This whole phenomenon, one where our decision making and POV is affected by prejudices ovcuring at the unconscious level, is called Implicit BIas. It’s not limited to race and it’s not limited to the United States. It is, in fact, part of the human condition. It also isn’t a moral failing. The majority of white people in this country consciously hold egalitarian values. This is why explicit measures of bias and prejudice basically have no predicative value as to what people will actually do.
Implicit measures, on the other hand, do tend to predict behavior in experimental settings. The most famous of these is the IAT, which you can actually take yourself at projectimplicit.net. The IAT tests categorical associations through reaction times.
Anyway, this is long-winded, but there’s decades now of scientific evidence as to the validity of implicit bias, its predicative power, etc. and so forth. There is also considerable evidence that believing oneself to be objective actually causes people to act with more rather than less bias. There is some evidence that being aware of implicit bias, coupled with context-specific interventions, can help safeguard our decision making processes from implicit bias’s effects.
This is why color-blindness is such a pernitious idea. It’s actually the opposite of what we need. It’s the delusion that we’re objective. And what the Right does is talk about color-blindness through one side of its mouth while stoking White racial anxiety with the other. So they take race off the table as a valid topic for discussion (“playing the race card”) while also talking about it in ways guaranteed to panic Whites. For an example of this, look at Fox’s coverage of the Zimmerman verdict.
This is great– “racism” being hard-wired is far preferable to “inherent superiority” being hard-wired, obviously. And so is the explanation about why denying it is evil. But then you need an explanation about behaving in a non-racist fashion, as well as the asymmetrical obligations (all minorities are inherently racist too, but do they have the same responsibilities?).
Hey Bert,
Interesting points. Just to complicate things further, it’s worth noting that implicit bias does not always correlate to the subject’s race on a 1:1 level. There are, for example, African Americans who show an implicit preference for White people and vice versa. Speaking in broad terms, people tend to prefer their own group and be biased against others (the term for this being “in group preference,”). But this isn’t always the case.
Implicit Bias is also not always determinative. We are not doomed to act in a biased fashion. And causality is, of course, very very hard to prove. What we can say is that tests for implicit bias have predicative validity and that implicit bias correlates in study after study with outcomes. But again, this is taking large sample groups (sometimes upwards of 5K people) and there are exceptions.
There are some studies supporting the idea that being aware of the fact that biases may be affecting our behavior can help us correct for bias. In addition, context-specific interventions have been really helpful. A basic example: many orchestras have inaugurated “blind” auditions so that the gender of the musician auditioning cannot be seen. This has led to greater gender diversity in orchestras. There are police departments that are launching pilot programs to try to override the mental associations between black men and crime etc.
And again, just to reiterate… implicit bias is a phenomenon that isn’t just about race. There are all sorts of tests about gender and age discrimination that show implicit bias operating.
Wow– thanks. Orchestras aren’t exactly redlined neighborhoods or fundamentalist theocracies, but perhaps encouraging.
So, all other factors notwithstanding, we assume racism, sexism, etc. as the norm. Depressing but certainly believable.
Also, I don’t want to give up on racism as having a historical dimension, for the record.
Regarding the implicit bias test regarding race: Correlation doesn’t imply causation. All the test seems to do is demonstrate correlations between concepts (AWFUL more easily categorized with BLACK, for example). That seems to just as well go along with knowledge of the history of racism as it does with some preference for whites. This seems too obvious to me, so I’m guessing that this has been argued about somewhere?
Here we go:
Maybe I’m misunderstanding…but it doesn’t seem like the test would be incompatible with a belief that racism is a history? It’s not saying that race bias has to be biological, is it? It’s just saying that people recognize race, and are influenced by race.The nature/nurture explanation doesn’t come into it.
Right? Or am I missing something?
Not “incompatible,” rather it doesn’t distinguish between associating bad concepts with blackness because of racial prejudice and associating them because of historical knowledge of such associations. I might more readily associate STARVATION with Africans than Americans, but that doesn’t mean I believe it’s because Africans deserve that or that it’s something about their racial makeup that makes them more likely to be impoverished or whatnot.
In other words, the test is rooted in old fashioned associationism, and says nothing, as far as I can tell, about schemata and the way we might act based on or think about such associations.
Well, that makes sense…though I guess I’d wonder if it’s possible to completely separate making the distinction from the prejudice.
Hey Charles,
The IAT is used because of its predicative validity. If it didn’t have that, no one would use it. But study after study demonstrates its predicative validity. And in tests with a range of possibilities rather than binary outcomes, the IAT predicts severity of responses.
Rather than try to paraphrase other more knowledgable people’s work that’s available on the internet for free, let me point you to Jost’s “The Existence of Implicit Bias Is Beyond a Reasonable Doubt” in handy-dandy pdf format:
http://www.psych.nyu.edu/jost/Jost,%20Rudman,%20Blair,%20Carney,%20Dasgupta,%20Claser,%20&%20Hardin%20(2009).PDF
What you’re raising here is the “culture” question, and the view that there’s a culture-as-contiminant phenomenon going on here. There’s a few meta studies that are slated for publication that address the culture-as-contaminant theory head on, and include studies that have refined the IAT (and use other measurements) to try to control for “cultural knowledge.” They’ve found in general that the culture-as-contaminant theory doesn’t show much validity.
I would also say that there’s no reason to suppose that knowledge ABOUT biased views doesn’t on some subconscious level underline and reinforce those associations. But as far as I know there’s not much proof around that, so I’m just thinking aloud here.
Noah, in no way does the existence of implicit bias obviate other arguments. The institutional, psychological, historical and cultural views of discrimination are all interrelated and influence each other. Implicit bias, for example, helps undergird institutionalized discrimination because people, believing themselves to be objective, don’t see a need for overt controls to help enable change.
sorry to double post but one more thing: there are also other ways of demonstrating and testing implicit bias than the IAT. And the IAT tests associations, so it can be used in more specific ways than good/bad and black/white. one study i recent read involved subliminally priming people in the juvenile justice system (police and parole officers) with words associated with “black” (homeboy, harlem etc. these words were found through pilot testing). They then read a race-neutral description of a juvenile crime. The ones who had been primed were more likely to view the offender as aggressive, as mature for his age, to recommend sending him through the adult rather than juvenile system and to rate him as likely to commit offenses again etc.
There’s studies that use blood pressure monitoring and brain imaging as well to document racialized anxieties, but I am underread on that stuff.
Maybe controlled experimentation is what it takes to get people to “believe” in racism. I’m okay with that.
hey you guys: there’s some psychological research that gels with our ideological preferences! We’d better lay off the phooey-on-psychology-who-says-the-Stroop-Effect-exists-aren’t-we’all-just-communities-telling-one-another-narrativesism, at least until the next time we want to remind people that such leading lights of academic psychology as Steven Pinker are dickheads.
You all maybe saw this about bias against or toward research (talk about “meta”): http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/09/12/how-to-argue-with-research-you-dont-like/
One reason I cherry-pick-like this research is because it cuts against the aggravating grain of humanist techno-optimism that evolution people would never own up to as a bias.
Steven Pinker isn’t doing psychological research is he? The Better Angels of Our Nature is mostly anthropology and history, right? And it makes waaaaay more sweeping claims than this does.
Maybe you’re talking about other claims by Pinker? Otherwise I don’t know why he’s relevant?
I was kidding about Pinker — the point was precisely that simplistic pop science writers like Pinker are not good representatives of science
bert, that flowchart is great!
Aha! I totally didn’t get that; I was wondering if Pinker had done psychology experiments I wasn’t aware of!
actually, he did. before he became a public intellectual, he started out in serious cognitive science and linguistics — but that’s not what I was getting at
Yeah, his stuff with the irregular past tense is pretty convincing. Convinced me, at least. And if I’m remembering right, he started off on color vision research.
And I was thinking what you were thinking, Jones.
Thanks, Isaac. I couldn’t get that link to work, but I found the article (I’ll give the linking a go) here (see if that works). Haven’t read it, yet, but it seems to address my issue.
Are you talking about this re irregular verbs? That seems fairly uncontroversial; not sure I’d have any problem with Pinker if he stuck with that.
Yeah, but connectionists don’t find it uncontroversial.
Speaking of irregular past tenses…do any of you recall the electrifying effect of an anecdotally reported ‘text’ from a conversation about a young woman: instead of saying ‘She only dated shrinks’, the speaker said ‘She only date shranks’.
Pretty astounding in its implications — if true. But, as the old saw goes, ‘anecdote’ is not a synonym of ‘evidence’ : the Ball Lightning Problem.
Charles…huh. Well, I have to say I still can’t bring myself to care. But I’d rather have Pinker doing that than babbling about how our ancestors are moral monsters and we’re all moving onward and upward to greater happiness forever.
By the way, a while back, when I said such stereotyping was an integral part of the cartoonist’s creative communication process with audiences, I think you all snorted with derision.
Am I misremembering?
In any case, it is, and not just for cartoonists, but for all popular culture creators.
Without such widely or universally understood stereotypes (or, more correctly, I think, frames of reference), mass communication would be impossible.
And while some are bad, it doesn’t make them all bad. In that regards, stereotypes are like people, I guess.
For pity’s sake, there’s a difference between suggesting that there is some evidence that on the whole people react to racism and suggesting that cartoonists need to retail stereotypes in order to communicate. There aren’t any tests that say that without racism we’re unable to communicate with each other, as far as I know.
Actually, without the subconscious processing that results in schemas and stereotypes, we really would be unable to function. That said, cannily understanding how and when to deploy a stereotype (and again, I’m using this in its value neutral term), when to subvert it, and when do present a counter-stereotypic representation is often part of the mark of an interesting artist.
“Actually, without the subconscious processing that results in schemas and stereotypes, we really would be unable to function.”
Okay…so there I’m somewhat skeptical. Schemas don’t seem like they’d have to be the same thing as stereotypes, just for starters….
Also, unless I’m confused, Russ is saying that cartooning uniquely needs to use stereotypes, right?
i’m not weighing in on russ’s point, i’m simply saying that without the process of sorting things into categories and creating subconscious associations and narratives surrounding them we’d be really screwed. if we had had to stop and figure out “is that a sabre toothed tiger” all the time we wouldn’t’ve survived. That’s really all i’m saying.
Ack…don’t go ev psych on me now….
I’m not! I’m just saying that a lot of this stuff is the side effect of normal brain function rather than a moral failing on anyone’s part. That said, I don’t think, just to weigh in on whatever this issue is about cartooning, that this means we have to communicate using them.
you need to remember that “stereotype” here doesn’t mean specifically racial stereotype, but merely, as Isaac said, our “associations and stories” about “categories of people”. And we can have associations and stories about categories of people, whatever those categories are. So this doesn’t tell us why we carve up people the way we actually do; a priori, we might as well categorise people on the basis of whether they were born on a Thursday and the length of their toes. The fact that we categorise and form stereotypes on the basis of “race”, gender, religion and sexual orientation is a fact that needs further explanation.
So Russ is surely right that cartooning relies on our “associations and stories” about “categories of people” — plausibly all representational art relies on the artist variously deploying and subverting same. When we see a cartoon of one guy lying on a couch and another guy with beard and glasses sitting nearby on a chair, we form a bunch of expectations about (a) their respective social roles, (b) the kind of things they will say and do, and (c) whether or not we’re reading another shitty New Yorker cartoon. But, again, this says nothing about whether cartooning or art in general relies on the types of “stereotypes”, and more fundamentally categories, that we find morally objectionable.