Fighting Bias via Social Pressure · 10:16am Apr 2nd, 2015
I learned something interesting this evening, and I thought I'd share.
Some time ago, a few psychology professors decided to run an experiment to determine whether or not making people aware of bias would lessen in. They had two groups of people; they told one group that bias against women was rare, and told the other group that bias against women was common. Afterwards, they asked the two groups about their perceptions of women.
The group who were told that bias against women were common rated women as significantly less career-oriented and more family-oriented. Even when instructed to "try to avoid thinking about others in such a manner", this group still viewed women more traditionally after being told that a vast majority of people still held to such stereotypes.
In another study, two groups of managers were treated in the same one - one group was informed that bias against women was common, the other that it was rare. They then read a transcript of a job interview, and were alternatively told that the subject being interviewed was male or female.
The group who was told that stereotypes of women were common were 28% less likely to hire the "female" candidate and judged them to be 27% less likable. This, again, despite encouragement not to be biased.
In another study, a team tried to stop people from stealing petrified wood from the Petrified Forest by posting a sign that noted: “Many past visitors have removed the petrified wood from the park, changing the state of the Petrified Forest.”
The theft rate remained at 5%.
They made the warning more severe: “Your heritage is being vandalized every day by theft losses of petrified wood of 14 tons a year, mostly a small piece at a time.”
The theft rate changed - it increased from 5% to 8%.
“Please don’t remove the petrified wood from the park.”
The theft rate dropped to 1.67%.
Why? Because the second sign told people that stealing wood was common, and people did it all the time - so why not do it yourself as well? The last sign told them that it was wrong to take the wood, so they were less likely to do so.
The key to combating bias is not to make people aware that bias is prevalent, but to make it clear that bias is unacceptable, deviant behavior. If people believe that being biased is a minority view, and are told that most people disapprove of bias, they are much less likely to discriminate. When they repeated the study with the managers, but instead told them that bias was unacceptable and most people try to be as unbiased as possible, the discrimination against the "female" candidate vanished, and she was found to be just as employable as the "male" candidate.
If you think about it, this makes sense. Social norms determine behavior. When you tell people "contrary to popular belief, black people aren't inferior to white people", what happens? You've just told them that most people believe that black people are inferior. They may not have believed it before, but if most people believe it, maybe they've got a point, right?
If, on the other hand, you present it as "In the past, people discriminated against black people; today, that behavior is widely seen as unacceptable and will get you socially ostracized", then you're having peer pressure work in your favor. Now, the racists are the bad guys; people who are racist are the minority, and many people will naturally gang up against minority members in order to align with the majority. If you realign the majority from being "black/white" or "men/women" to "egalitarians/bigots", you end up with more positive results.
So when you see people complain about how common some bad behavior is, they may well be perversely encouraging it by normalizing it. And ironically, it is the very same principle that leads many people to discriminate as it is that can discourage them from it - the pressure of the masses to conform.
It is good to know that sometimes we can manipulate base human nature in our own favor.
2935891
To be fair, in English, we have the singular they which can be used for that sort of thing (as well as for other purposes).
And yes, political correctness gone mad is a bad thing. The so-called Social Justice Warriors are a bunch of nutters.
2935954
Probably because we use the singular "they" for people of indefinite gender and "it" for objects. But yeah, we don't really have an equivalent of "on" for people, we just kind of appropriated "they" for that purpose.
Then again, we have done a lot of weird stuff like that over time.
Have you ever read Harrison Bergeron?
Anyway, as far as the "perfect balance" thing, I think it has to do with people trying to deny personal responsibility for their bad behavior (or justify their bad behavior) rather than as a genuine result of people taking things too far, by and large (though the latter does happen). It has to do with an insane sense of entitlement by some people, who seem to think that nothing is ever their fault and that people disagreeing with them is unconscionable.
Basically, worthless people being worthless. They aren't pro-equality or taking things too far; they're just crazy people who make excuses for themselves, and use the veneer of a respectable cause as a cover for their bad behavior. Kind of like how "white supremacist" groups claim to be pro-white people, rather than anti-other people, even though their behavior seems to be almost entirely about being racist. Or more recently, how people claimed it was their "religious freedom" to discriminate against gays.
Huh. That's rather surprising, but it does make sense. People want to fit in.
Probably the same mechanism that allows people to disagree with a situation only after disagreeing has turned into the majority opinion. Group thinking always scare me, specially not knowing if I am employing it or not.
This is a valuable insight. There's more to it than this (something really interesting and relevant to the topic), but I don't have time to reply at the moment (this week is a mess for me). Poke me after S5 so I can remember to respond. (I used to study bias in grad school for psych.)
Huh. Interesting. Sorry I don't have anything else to say.
2936015
I disagree with both the "people want everyone to be the same" theory and the "trying to justify bad behavior" theory. In my opinion, most extreme social justice fanatics, like most hate groups, actually, are about social interaction and performing. I'll bet that whoever insists that a convention needs a safe space, and whoever volunteers to organize it, gets extra points in those social circles. Being the first or loudest voice to call someone out on twitter gets likes and retweets. Being victimized brings you attention and sympathy. Heck, you see it again and again from MsScribe in Harry Potter fandom to RequiresHate more recently that it's really easy for fakes and con artists to manipulate these things.
It turns it into a scavenger hunt for new things to call out, defend, or condemn (like searching Noah Trevor's old tweets to find something racist he said five years ago and make a big deal out of it) and the fact that it actually hurts the causes they claim to be supporting doesn't matter to them. But it is useful to mention the main point of this post to people who are on the fringes, who do care about these issues and might think they respect these people or are actually helping by following their lead, before they get sucked into the game.
Edit: Actually, I don't totally disagree with the "trying to justify bad behavior" theory. I think that bullies and crazy people tend to be best at these games, so it does a good job of giving them cover.
You will be biased against this opinion because all life have biases in order to survive in whatever environment they exist in...
The last sign asked them using a formal beginning and it was polite in ways to disarm attempts at stealing while the second sign issued a challenge.
Also, small control groups are small and 85% of all statistics are made up.
There's a lot I don't know, but this is my current view. You bring up a fascinating point.
2936372
I've been told I'm a crazy person.
2936613
A quick summery of the parts of my examples are relevant:
MsScribe was a fanfic writer who wanted to associate with the biggest names in Harry Potter fandom. Among other dishonest things, she made a fake account for a racist homophobe, and used that account to attack herself and other big name fans. This brought her attention both from the fandom, who rallied around them against the "attacker" and the other people targeted, who sympathized with her. She then made sure the "attacker" was associated with parts of the fandom the bigger names didn't like, and said lots of things she could respond to with witty comebacks. This made her seem witty and cool, and it totally worked. The parts of the fandom the big names didn't like were tarred and feathers, the big names thought she was really cool and invited her to hang out at cons, and she got a ton of followers even though she'd only ever written three fanfics that weren't that popular. And it wasn't until years later that someone collected the evidence to prove that her "attacker" was a sock puppet.
RequiresHate/WinterFox was probably the nastiest SJW the net has seen, she moved in the SciFi/Fantasy literary circles and used mean, hateful language to attack anyone she perceived as committing any social justice sin-- erasure, appropriation, misogyny, stereotyping, whatever. She developed a following, and got into fights with authors, and did serious damage to quite a few reputations of authors and critics. Recently, it came out that she was a writer herself, who had been well received, and the people she was attacking were her competition. And once again, until someone figured it out, it was working-- she was ruining reputations of anyone she wanted to while keeping her reputation as an author squeaky clean.
These are extreme examples, I think more people (like the general population of tumblr) feel that racism, misogyny, transphobia, etc are bad things, but that's just not the thing that's really important to them. What's really important to them is that everyone they hang out with or want attention from know that these are bad things, so by trumpeting every time they're victimized, every time they find someone who said or did something racist or sexist, or every time they've found some other disadvantaged group to fight for, they get reinforcement from their community, even if these things hurt their cause (by seeming extreme enough that other people are scared off or they seem insane, by normalizing these things, or even by attacking other people who are trying to help by focusing on some stupid detail.)
As an example of that, I don't think that Anita Sarkeesian has manufactured any part of her experience of being attacked by gamers with rape and death threats for making her feminist videos. I do think that the only reason she's so public about this is not to get people to stop (as per TD's original post, I suspect it does the opposite, and makes people more likely to send rape and death threats because everyone appearently does it) but I think she's public about it because she gets sympathy, attention for herself and her videos, and donations (after all, this is directly the reason her $8000 kickstarter made $160,000.) I don't think she's helped feminism or the conversation around women and games, she's set it back in a lot of ways, but she gets to do TED talks and academic talks and seem like an Important Person as long as this continues.
Holy heck! 18 notifications. Clearly this really was of interest to people.
2936372
Yeah, I was definitely oversimplifying. They don't have one single motive. Winning points in their social circles is definitely a thing.
This is definitely true, though I think the primary target audience of this stuff is actually people who aren't involved in that whole mess at all, but rather ordinary folks trying to do the best they can within their organizations. These studies came to my attention via the US Department of Agriculture, which was sending around links to its staff about how to best combat bias in hiring decisions. Amusingly, the original article they linked to, true to the lesson, never once mentioned how common prejudice actually was outside of the studies.
2936492
It falls in line with other experiments, like the Asch conformity experiments. If you tell people that a certain way of thinking or point of view or answer is held by the majority, it isn't terribly surprising that a lot of folks are more likely to go along with it.
2936548
I think that whether or not you view political correctness as a good thing depends on your definition of political correctness, as well as how far you take it.
Wikipedia defines political correctness as "an attitude or policy of being careful not to offend or upset any group of people in society who are believed to have a disadvantage." I think there are some complexities here.
I think, for me, the line falls between "being inclusive" and "being ridiculous." I think, for instance, that many examples of political correctness - firefighter, police officer - are fine. Saying "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" is fine; it is an attempt to be inclusive. And being inclusive is good, and frankly, a lot of businesses do it because it is good for business.
Likewise, I think referring to Native Americans as such is reasonable. With the many, many, Indians-from-India who have moved to the US, referring to people as "Indians" is just confusing - do you mean people from India, or the indiginous people of the US? "American Indians" thus bothers me unduly, not because it is offensive, but just because it is confusing. But, well, if people want to call themselves such, I don't really care - I just prefer clarity.
Not going out of your way to offend people is, I think, generally a good principle of social interaction.
That being said, some kinds of political correctness lead to confusion or vagueness. Most blacks in the US have been here for much longer than the Irish have; their ancestors mostly came in the 1700s. Calling them "African-Americans" at this point is dumb, especially given that there are actual people in the US who have recently moved here from Africa, and who are, therefore, literal "African-Americans". It also leads to the (extremely stupid) situation where white people from Africa can (quite correctly) mark "African-American" on forms, which makes collecting many sorts of demographic data confusing. Though I do always chuckle a little at the Afrikaaners who mark "African-American" on such forms.
It also leads to the (wrong) idea that all people in Africa are black, which is obviously wrong if you've ever seen people from North Africa. Or, for that matter, the many white people who live in South Africa, and have for more than a century at this point.
I dislike a lot of euphemistic language. "Visually impaired" instead of "blind" and "hearing impaired" instead of "deaf" are both idiotic. If you're blind, you're blind; if you're deaf, you're deaf. There's no point in being euphemistic about it, and using those terms is much clearer; someone who is blind cannot see, and requires more accomodation - if they literally cannot see, that's different from someone who just can't see very well, and it is a distinction worth making.
I also dislike the so-called euphemism treadmill, where people keep trying to come up with new words for being mentally impaired. The reality is that people are going to use whatever word you use to describe autism, intellectual disability, schitzophrenia, and whatever other mental issues people have as insults. This is because we love similies and metaphors, and asking people if they are "retarded" or "intellectually disabled" or "stupid" or whatever else is inevitably going to happen because we're dicks and we like to say that people are not very smart as an insult. I understand the mentality behind it, but frankly, I think it is futile; people are going to do it no matter what, and what you really end up doing is confusing people.
"Differently abled" is just stupid, as is "special". If you are disabled, pretending like you're not is just going to annoy people (and possibly result in you getting less consideration as a result of it being less evident that there is something actually wrong with you). It also means that people are going to use "special" as an insult, which they already are.
The worst form of political correctness to me, though, is simple denial of reality because people are worried about offending people. For instance, a lot of people get very upset about intelligence research because they don't like the implications that some people are smarter than other people, and that this is measurable - but it is so. Likewise, people who get upset over standardized testing bother me - we don't do it because we're evil, we do it because standardized testing is useful and allows us to measure people across multiple different environments and make fair comparisons.
This kind of political correctness is completely unacceptable to me.
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Oregon, the state I'm from, had the so-called CIM and CAM - the Certificate of Initial Mastery (to be passed by grade 10, i.e. two years before you finished high school/secondary school) and the Certificate of Advanced Mastery (to be passed by grade 12, i.e. when you graduated from high school). The plan was to deny anyone who failed to pass the CIM a diploma, then to move on to deny anyone who failed to pass the CAM a diploma after a few years.
Eventually, they discarded the idea - nearly 2/3rds of people would fail to graduate from high school under these standards.
By and large, people don't oppose higher educational standards because they want people to be controlled - they oppose them because the higher standards imply that they themselves are stupid and/or ignorant.
Hrrm. I wonder if there's an identifiable subset of the population that would exhibit the opposite reaction, specifically because they're trying to buck societal normalcy… this might be a tad too hardwired into our brains though.
Ah, time to post while administering a midterm!
This idea actually cuts both ways. If you ask most students the question: "What proportion of students cheat?", students who cheat invariably think everypony cheats, while students who do not cheat invariably think cheating is rare. (This bit of psych is actually relevant to my position because academic misconduct is, in fact, rampant (from my non-cheating perspective). I'm sending at least two students up for it this term, possibly more.)
I think the interesting thing possibly missed here is how the perception mitigates behavior differently for different "kinds" of ponies, where the classification is by moral reasoning. Ponies whose reasoning is based on lower-levels of moral development are going to be motivated not to cheat when they learn that cheating is rare, because behaving against prevailing opinion is "wrong" for them. Ponies whose reasoning is based on a more abstract sense of ethical behavior are going to be motivated not to cheat because it would be unfair for them to cheat if only a tiny proportion of ponies actually did cheat. Different reasons, which in this case just happen to align.
Another aside: this also applies to bias and bias crime. Racism didn't simply disappear when the 70's hit, it just went underground. The reason it went underground is it became highly unpopular to voice racist ideology, and ponies who are highly racist are much more likely to have authoritarian personalities: a personality which rigidly views "going against the grain" as unacceptable.
2941193
I was going to ask "do you really think communists are more racist than libertarians?", but then I thought about it for a few moments and remembered the nasty things that happened in the USSR and the PRC and realized that might actually be true.
That being said, by making racism unacceptable to express, you are, effectively, getting rid of it; people who aren't allowed to express it have difficulty passing it on, those who do express it tend to be socially ostracized, thus furthering the unacceptability of racism, ect.
It doesn't really matter if people are racist deep down inside; it matters whether people express said racism.
2941283
Really depends on what you mean by "communist". I assume you mean the people in power in a state capitalism like the USSR, in which case that kinda varies depending on how they came to power. If you mean the philosophical commtypes, they range the gamut too: hippies to authoritarians.
Yes and no about the expression part. Sure, you're getting rid of most overt acts of racism, but covert racism grows like kudzu, and it's much harder to fight than overt racism.
2941796
They were communists. I mean, they were evil dicks, but they were still communists. They called themselves communist, they conducted their country in a communistic fashion, they promoted communistic ideals, and while yes, they were run by what amounted to dictators (or oligarchies), that's hardly surprising. Rather like how some people will claim that people who are trying to monopolize markets (and thereby restrict free trade) are not true capitalists because they're abusing the system.
It took us two centuries to get blacks civil rights in the US.
Forty years after that, we ended up with a black president and a black guy in charge of the GOP.
I think it is pretty clear that fighting covert racism is vastly easier than fighting overt racism, seeing as we're getting much better results now. And frankly, I think that covert racism has a much harder time growing, because you aren't allowed to express it. Indeed, I think racism has been dying off pretty badly.
Indeed, stats seem to indicate that blacks are not heavily persecuted in our society as a whole. A bit over 50% of homicides are committed by blacks (1980s-2000s had them at 52.5% of known killers), and roughly 48% of people on death row are black, indicating they're no more likely than whites to be sentenced to death for killing someone (the only crime you can now be sentenced to death for). Blacks who score well on tests do as well as whites who score equally well on tests - the tests are as good at predicting future income levels and grades for both black and white students, which indicates that blacks are not being discriminated against very significantly in terms of employment opportunities (otherwise, we would expect them to underperform their white peers) or in education (biased professors aren't giving them bad grades, on average). The list goes on.
That's a good thing! It suggests whatever lingering racism there may be, it does not appear to be unduly affecting people in several important ways. And that is a vast improvement over how things were back in the 1950s.
As was noted by Lee Atwater:
Surveys seem to indicate that "racist" viewpoints are a minority in both parties. That certainly wasn't true back in the 1950s - heck, it took until the 1990s for more than 50% of Americans to be okay with interracial marriage. That's a huge increase, and a really big difference.
But this is wonderful! It means that people rationally update their beliefs to be closer to the average.
(No, I'm not being sarcastic.)
2942451
Well, it makes sense from an evolutionary viewpoint; the ability to conform probably makes it less likely you'll be singled out.
2942586 It's rational to adjust your opinion to be closer to the opinions of others. Maybe not always, but perhaps more often than either you or I do.
This seems a little too lab-based for me. I mean, when someone actually posts about all the sexist shit they get, sexist people respond with the expected posts, but people who aren't sexist and aren't used to getting sexist shit respond with surprise and support. The more aware people are that bad stuff is happening, the more social force they can bring to shame people who're doing bad stuff.
2947777
That's not what the study was about. The study is about societal expectations, not about sharing personal experiences. You're talking about something completely different.
The "Internet bullying" thing you're talking about here (which, let's be honest here, is what this actually is - people ganging up to bully people who are considered to be socially acceptable targets) isn't really that helpful honestly, and frequently actually makes things worse. Even if you're in the right, it tends to make you look like the aggressor to outside observers, frequently because the people who swoop in out of nowhere ARE simply nothing but bullies looking for socially acceptable targets to attack so they can be aggressive and receive public approval for their antisocial behavior. Look at how nasty many of these people are. Are they good people? Or are they awful people who attach themselves to various causes so that they can justify hurting other people?
It is probably more obvious to you when you see conservatives lumping in on people - think about any stupid, made-up controversy, or Obamacare's failures, or any number of other things. Look at how nasty many of the people involved are - how they say that the people are personally awful people, how they shouldn't be allowed to do anything, shouldn't have any power, anyone who supports them is a total idiot, ect.
Now look at the folks who lump in on these social issues, and track their behavior, and compare it. If you remove the issue they're talking about, are they behaving in the same way?
These folks - and they're extremely numerous - are not good people. They simply wear different colored shirts. They're useful pawns when they're on your side, but they're dangerous and very unpleasant people, and best to keep at arms length.
And when you're in the wrong...
Well, just look at what happened after Ferguson. I have long posted in news comments threads, but since Ferguson, I've seen a lot more black people making racist comments about white people on news posts, the crazy anti-cop folks have gotten more numerous (and crazier), and a lot of other people are now rolling their eyes at any and all claims of racism by black people. The Gamergate thing likewise made "feminists" look like a bunch of evil, greedy, self-serving assholes to a large percentage of people involved in video games. And the Rolling Stone faux-rape thing was just the latest in a string of similar events as far as the whole campus rape scare moral panic thing goes.
And if you want to look at similar right-wing nonsense, look at the nutters who thought that Ebola was going to come to the US via illegal immigrants from Mexico (unsurprisingly, it came in by plane), the whole Israel business (everyone secretly hates Jews because they don't support Israel!), or the "religious freedom" stuff (i.e. that religious people are being attacked for hating gays). I'm sure you could come up with other examples.
Moral panics are never good, and a lot of this stuff is about moral panics. Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn, the shooting of Michael Brown and the ensuing riots, and the "rape on campus" thing are all moral panics, and they all have been bad for society. When people are reacting emotionally rather than rationally,
2947850 I tried writing up a response to what you're saying, but I realized you're also talking about something very different from the conditions in the study. And I think that may be the problem! I think we can agree that heaping abuse on people isn't productive (though it can be satisfying.) All I'm trying to say is that "spew bile" and "say nothing" aren't the only possible options--that when you get into the real world and have the choice of how to tailor your message, things become more complex than a simple laboratory study.
Obviously, you didn't actually say this in the post, but when you're saying that "complaining" means "normalizing," the implication seems to be to "not complain." But when people are talking, and you choose not to talk, the folks who are talking are the folks who set the standards. And when the folks who're talking are sexist assholes, sexist assholery will be the standard. In order to make any sort of change, someone has to talk eventually.
Edit: to hell with it, I'll get confrontational. 90% of what you're saying is what I've been saying, and I've been repeatedly called an asshole for it. Laid out like this, I feel like I can understand why. When people are trying to talk about how they've been insulted or harassed, and you're effectively telling them to shut the hell up, it feels like part of the harassment.
2947924
The problem isn't talking about harassment. The problem is the normalization of behavior.
Complaining about stuff doesn't normalize it. Claiming that said behavior is common does normalize it. And the latter is bad.
It is the difference between "I got raped" and "rape is common". When you suggest that negative behavior is common, it validates it in the minds of many people.
A good example of an extreme case is piracy. It is normalized behavior that costs billions of dollars a year, but when people try to talk about it being bad, a lot of folks will scoff - it is so common, the idea that it is illegal and people should be punished for it seems absurd. You even see people complaining about people actually enforcing copyright law. But it is illegal, and it is illegal for a reason.
As noted by the studies, they pointed out that people showed more bigotry when they were told bigotry was common, even if they were told not to behave in a bigoted manner. Saying that most people disapproved of bigotry, however, had positive results. That isn't even complaining, that's actively trying to get people not to behave in a discriminatory manner.
It doesn't matter what they're told is good or bad, it matters what they believe other people do.
The problem isn't people talking. It is people talking about it as if it is commonplace. Even if it is commonplace, you should not act as if it is commonplace if you want people to improve their behavior. People are self-conscious, and will tend to conform to what they feel society expects of them.
The sort of internet gang bullying you were talking about - what the so-called culture warriors, SJWs, the "moral majority", and similar types engage in - is bad, but it isn't really the same thing as what these studies were talking about. Of course, that, too, leads to normalized behavior (attacking people online, doxxing people, sending death threats, ect.) within the sort of person who participates in such things.
How do I upvote this?
2953014
Alas, there is no way to upvote blog posts. I'm glad you liked it, though.