Month: March 2013

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You Need a New Drug: Blindspot

“Blindspot” by psychologists Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald is about this wonderful diagnostic test, the IAT.

The IAT reveals, to the interviewers and social psychology researchers, what you really think. Not what you say you think. Not what you think you say you think. And– God forbid– not what you think you think you think. But what you really think. “Ah ha!”, the researchers exclaim. Now I know the truth: you are a racist. Malcolm Gladwell took the test: busted! Or so he admitted to Oprah, while pointing out that his own mother was black.

These researchers– these “social psychologists”– are generous on one level. They believe that people who say they don’t judge people according to their race or age or physical appearance really mean it and think that they really mean it. So when they administer a test that proves that they do judge people according to their race or age or physical appearance, they believe they have uncovered a terrible secret about humanity and you, lucky reader, get to be let in on it.

There are a lot of problems with this bullshit, at many different levels.

  • people are often fully aware of the fact that they don’t mean what they say. In fact, I’d say it’s probably safe to say that most people don’t really mean what they say most of the time. Every good novelist and film-maker– and a lot of bad ones– knows this. Every job applicant knows it. Every politician certainly knows it but so do pastors and priests.
  • the IAT claims to bypass a persons’ self-censorship and reveal what a person “really” thinks. The trouble is, you have to assume, firstly, that most people don’t know that they think something other than what they claim to think. In other words, the IAT fails to take into account that most people are quite capable of consciously lying to an interviewer or to a form. Why wouldn’t they? The act of answering questions like “black people are more likely to commit crimes” will immediately push the “careful what you say” button, even if the interviewer thinks the subject has every reason to be perfectly honest with them, or with the form and no matter how often they tell the subject that their answers are confidential. You don’t think a subject can imagine dishonesty or a mistake on the part of a social scientist? In fact, you’ve got to be kidding if you think that for even one moment. Gladwell’s claim to be shocked at his own hidden bias must be taken as disingenuous: I don’t believe for a second that it was really a surprise to him. And if he really thinks that the IAT has proven that he has unconscious prejudices, he is even dumber than I thought.
  • the IAT seems to me to prove that people have an instinctive preference for young people (shocking!) or for people of the most privileged class (white people, who are objectively richer and more powerful than any other race on earth) or men, who are often bigger, stronger, and faster than women, and who, until now, have generally held more positions of power, wealth, and influence than women. Who do you want to hang out with? The guy most likely to be able to afford to buy you a drink and dinner? Do you think it’s more likely that a poor person would steal than a rich person? Duh. Do you think a black person, or a native, or a Latino, is more likely to be poor? Hello. Is it fun to listen to conversations about medications, adult diapers, friends who have recently died and how the world sucks now that public morality has slid into the cesspool?
  • There are other stereo-types: I’ll bet the average subject doesn’t think of the Japanese as drug-abusing burglars. But they probably do think they study hard. The French are disloyal. People with glasses are smart. Tall people like basketball.

The point is that the biggest lies in our society don’t involve facts and data, but how the information is presented: Banaji and Greenwald are shocked, so they say, to discover that many people who say they think they are not racists actually do “unconsciously” hold racist views.

Their “facts” prove it. Their facts, actually, prove that they are pretty clueless about how people actually process their words and actions in relation to their feelings and inclinations. And they are even more clueless than that: they are surprised that people don’t announce their racist, ageist, and sexist sentiments. They are surprised that no bigot thinks he is a bigot while knowingly holding bigoted views.

As it turns out, someone else’s research seems to show that the results from the IAT are unreliable.

We live in a culture in which people not only hide their unsavory feelings about others– we positively embrace hypocrisy on a monumental scale.

Unconvinced? Banaji and Greenwald note that we often answer “how are you?” with “fine” even if we’re not. They’re on to you!

Afterthought

I am happy to learn I am not alone in my skepticism.

Added 2014-10-04: A NyTimes article questioning the reliability of some “research”.

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The Absurdity of PDFs

I’m waiting for someone to introduce a file format that can’t be edited or altered. Like the PDF used to be.

And then I would give it a month before someone offers a program that will edit or alter that file format.

And two years before the company that created the format will offer software to edit and alter it. It’s like anti-anti-anti-missiles. Eventually you realize that you are paying for software to create a file format that can’t be edited so you can buy software to edit it.

Afterthought

Bell Telephone will, for a few dollars a month, NOT publish your phone number in a phone book. Isn’t that nice of them? But, for a few dollars more, you can have your phone show the caller id of unlisted numbers. That’s even nicer.

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Sherry and Ray

She is just aching to get laid by Ray but he won’t do it.

When I was in college I knew a young woman named Sherry. She was voluptuous. Her face wasn’t as cute as some other women I knew, but it was pleasant enough. I had always thought of her as a moderately attractive young woman until the day I was out cutting the grass on a tractor and she happened to be sun-bathing behind the faculty apartments and when I came around from behind the apartment building, she was startled and had to jump up and reattach the top of her bathing suit. She was voluptuous. The sinuous curve of her hips. Her full, upright breasts. She looked pretty peeved as I drove by.  It was actually her stomach that appealed the most to me: flat, with languorous curves. 

She was a conservative little American girl. I was a Canadian and the Canadians tended to be socially liberal– we drank and smoked and swore and used pot– and the Americans tended to be rather conventional. Some of them had never been in a bar until they left home to go to college. But not Sherry. She didn’t go to bars at college either. Good girls didn’t do that.

The American guys like to wrestle each other and horse around with each other and pat each others’ behinds while playing touch football in the courtyard.  The Canadian guys like to wrestle Canadian girls. The American girls thought Canadian girls were rather rural in that regard. I’ll bet they secretly envied them. I remember wrestling for an extended time with an attractive blonde named Janet in the student lounge and a couple of my American friends, afterwards, expressed envy. They thought it meant she wanted to get laid.

I will note that my experience was that many of my American friends went to a bar to get drunk, while most of my Canadian friends went out to a bar for a drink or two and to socialize. To our American friends, there was no difference between drinking and getting drunk: they were both sins.  The Canadians were used to social drinking but thought it was not smart to get drunk.

Sherry was engaged to Ray, who worked in the administration. Ray was even more strait-laced than Terry. He was square, man. He wore suits. He had short hair. If Ray was coming down the hallway in the dorm, you hid the grass. But I had heard from a number of reliable sources that Ray had sewn his wild oats profligately in his first three years at college: girls were wild for him. He was tall and good-looking and rich. But when he met Sherry, the love of his life, he decided to reform. He would wait until they were married before they consummated their mutual passion.

He wanted to marry a virgin. He wanted her to be pure.

One day, I was chatting with Sherry’s roommate Lisa about something and the Sherry and Ray relationship came up. I made some off-hand remark about something and Lisa said this: “Sherry is going absolutely crazy. She is just aching to get laid but he wants her to be a virgin on their wedding day.”

She used a less kind word than “laid”.

I had two theories about this. Firstly, I thought that Ray was a raging hypocrite.

Secondly, I thought that maybe the stories about him being promiscuous his first years at college were untrue. Certainly, they were impossible to confirm. Maybe he really was pure.

Later, I talked to a young woman who had been a Resident Assistant at the time Ray was allegedly sewing his wild oats.  Oh yes, she said, everybody knew about Ray.  There were girls who had to leave college after he got them pregnant.  He was an asshole.

An American told me, if a girl put out, you took it, but you didn’t want to marry a slut.  He said it as if it was common sense, not that old double-standard we all know and love.