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Mechanisms of Prejudice: Hidden and Not Hidden

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AGelbert:
Bigots Are Generally Untrustworthy

The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye. The more light you shine on it, the more it will contract.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/o/oliverwend134476.html#ObDyMCS39iukA02P.99

AGelbert:
The Hidden Mechanisms of Prejudice: Implicit Bias & Interpersonal Fluency by Alex Madva


--- Quote ---This dissertation is about prejudice. In particular, it examines the theoretical and ethical questions raised by research on implicit social biases. Social biases are termed “implicit” when they are not reported, though they lie just beneath the surface of consciousness.
Such biases are easy to adopt but very difficult to introspect and control.

Despite this difficulty, I argue that we are personally responsible for our biases and obligated to overcome them if they can bring harm to ourselves or to others.

My dissertation addresses the terms of their removal. It is grounded in a comprehensive examination of empirical research and, as such, is a contribution to social psychology. Although implicit social biases significantly influence our judgment and action, they are not reducible to beliefs or desires. Rather, they constitute a class of their own.

Understanding their particular character is vital to determining how to replace them with more
preferable habits of mind. I argue for a model of interpersonal fluency, a kind of ethical
expertise that requires transforming our underlying dispositions of thought, feeling, and action
.
--- End quote ---





--- Quote ---The associations in our heads belong to us… The selves that we are and the selves we intend tobe are both us, and sometimes they do not agree. One might say that humans are large, containing multitudes. Full recognition of this fact raises serious questions for important issues of responsibility, culpability, and intentionality.
~ Brian Nosek and Robert Hansen (2008, 553, 591)

A 2004 study found that, after attending an all-women’s college for one year, female
undergraduates’ implicit attitudes regarding gender and leadership qualities were completely
overhauled.1

Beforehand, participants were quicker to associate female names like “Emily” with
attributes stereotypical of female leaders, like “nurturing,” whereas they were quicker to
associate male names like “Greg” with attributes stereotypical of male leaders, like “assertive.”

After one year, these implicit biases vanished; they were no more likely to associate “Emily”
with nurturance than with assertiveness. The same study also found that attending a coed
university had the opposite effect on female undergraduates.

After one year, they were even more likely to associate “Greg” with assertiveness. What accounts for the difference? The mediating factor was not, the evidence suggests, a supportive or encouraging atmosphere. The difference evidently boiled down to the total number of classes that students had taken with female math and science professors, that is, with female professors in historically maledominated fields.

In fact, a closer look at the data showed that this was true regardless of which institution they attended. What’s just as striking is the fact that neither group showed any changes in their reflective, self-reported beliefs about women, nurturance, and leadership.

Before as well as after, at both schools, participants consistently claimed that women possess more supportive qualities than leadership ones.  :( ???
--- End quote ---

This first part is about gender roles. Wait until we get to judging (i.e. "pre"  ;)) the level of threat in the behavior of same or other races (hint: the behavior, look, stance, clothing, etc. doesn't have BEANS to do with it and RACE has EVERYTHING to do with it.).

Those "parent tapes" are hard to MODIFY, aren't they?  

AGelbert:

--- Quote ---Implicit attitudes are studied indirectly, most commonly by measures like the Implicit Association Test (IAT), which tests how quickly individuals associate pairs of items, such as male and female names with leadership traits.2 Implicit attitudes contrast with explicit attitudes, which are paradigmatically expressed in individuals’ reflective judgments and self-reported commitments.

How are we to understand cases such as these in which our automatic, intuitive responses come apart from our considered commitments?

The 2004 study is particularly striking in that the automatic, virtually unconscious tendencies of students in the women’s college seem to have been in some sense getting it right while their reflective judgments persisted in getting it wrong.  :o
--- End quote ---



--- Quote ---Implicit attitudes shape a wide range of pivotal decisions
and actions without our ever realizing it. They influence our judgments about whom to trust and whom to ignore, whom to promote and whom to imprison. While it would be a mistake to think that implicit attitudes are intrinsically bad or regrettable features of human psychology, our failure to appreciate what they are and how they affect us can cause serious and pervasive harm.
--- End quote ---


--- Quote ---In the paradigmatic cases I consider in this dissertation, the challenge is what to do about the implicit attitudes that get it wrong.

For example, while fewer and fewer Americans openly avow racist and sexist beliefs, subtle but pervasive forms of disparate treatment on the basis of race and gender persist.

Some researchers have suggested that part of the explanation for this state of affairs is that many Americans have egalitarian explicit attitudes—in that they sincerely embrace anti-racist and antisexist commitments—but nevertheless harbor a range of biased implicit attitudes.

In one study, participants evaluated two hypothetical candidates for a job as chief of police.3 One candidate had extensive “street” experience but little formal education; the other had extensive formal education but little street experience. When the street-smart candidate was male and the book smart candidate was female, participants said that street smarts were the most important criteria for being an effective police chief, and recommended promoting the man.

However, when the street-smart candidate was female and the book-smart candidate was male, participants said book smarts were more important, and, once again, recommended the man.

They unwittingly tailored their judgments about the tools necessary to be a successful police chief to match their gut feeling that the man was better suited than the woman for the job.  :P :o ???
--- End quote ---

The Hidden Mechanisms of Prejudice: Implicit Bias & Interpersonal Fluency by Alex Madva

AGelbert:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oh65ZsiwvKI&feature=player_embedded
Transcript:

Peter Z. Scheer: A question is “how should people of color respond to the dying of a civilization that has not been civil to them?”


[audience laughter and applause]

Chris Hedges: Well, I teach every Thursday night at a maximum security prison and I spent significant amounts of time with this book “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt” in statistically the poorest pockets of the country and the creation of omnipotent police forces, especially in urban areas has set a template. As anyone who knows has spent time in depressed urban areas, police on pretext stops can seize and incarcerate—you only get a few minutes with a public defender—anyone they want. And I find often in the prisons the people with the longest sentences are the people who refused to plea out because they were not guilty. But if you don’t plea out you’re finished; and they know it, the whole system’s rigged.

And one of the reasons that I would hope that those who were in many cities the engine of the Occupy movement, which were primarily underemployed or unemployed college educated kids, would begin to reach out to marginal communities not so much because I think these communities now are so broken and of course such a high dis-proportion of especially African-American men are within the system. Not just in prison but on parole; I mean they have all sorts of ways to cripple your life. I think that we have to make amends to these communities because we …

[audience applause]

… by supporting the Democratic Party, and in particular figures like Clinton, which rammed through the Omnibus bill and created a massive prison industrial complex, destroyed welfare—which as Bob points out 70 percent of the recipients in the old welfare system were children—passed NAFTA. We busied ourselves with a kind of boutique activism, multiculturalism, all of which I support, but at the expense of justice. We forgot about justice. And our poor and our working class were decimated. And what has happened now, there has been a Weimarization of the American working class. What’s happened to the working class is now being visited on the middle class; I mean this is how history works.

So, I think there’s a, for those of us who care about social change, one of the reasons we have to reach out to these communities—and one of the reasons I teach in the prison system—is because we have to make atonement for, in essence, turning our back on these people, while in the name of a kind of faux liberalism a war was made against their very beings.

[audience applause]
http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/chris_hedges_we_have_to_make_atonement_for_turning_our_backs_on_people_of_c

AGelbert:
Agelbert NOTE: DeBlasio changed his name from Warren Wilhelm to win an election. He comes from a family with some members in the CIA. He is a bought and paid for Clinton Clone. I don't like him for that reason. However the incredibly racist piece of crap by Cohen that Colbert exposed is worthy of PRAISE!


A Famous Columnist Has Trouble Defining Racism. Colbert Eats Him For Dinner.
 


Here’s the quote:

“Today’s GOP is not racist, as Harry Belafonte alleged about the tea party, but it is deeply troubled — about the expansion of government, about immigration, about secularism, about the mainstreaming of what used to be the avant-garde. People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York — a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children. (Should I mention that Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?)”

Wait, what?!


Alvin Melathe

Video Here: 


http://www.upworthy.com/a-famous-columnist-has-trouble-defining-racism-colbert-eats-him-for-dinner?c=upw1

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