White people are kinda assholes

[The Paul]

So it doesn't answer the question of whether or not it's justified to say "Oh yeah, well <insert race here> is just as bad!"

Oh well.

Actually, it doesn't answer the question of whether this is a white attitude at all.

Let's assume that you are trying to find out if blonde children like cookies, and you believe that they do. So you go ask a bunch of blonde children if they like cookies, and they all answer yes. Voila! You have a study that amazingly shows that BLONDE children like cookies and you publish it. You've shown a huge correlation between blondness and cookie-liking, haven't you?

Well, no. Just like in clinical trials for drugs, you have to show that there's a differential liking for cookies among blondes, or you've shown nothing at all. You haven't shown any relationship between blondes and cookies unless you can prove that blondes like cookies more than non-blondes do.

That's what this study failed to do: It failed to provide a control group. It failed to show that this relationship is more prevalent in white people than it is in other racial groups. Without showing that, it cannot draw a conclusion about the relationship between whiteness and belief about prison policy - because it can't say that the perspectives espoused by white people are any different from the perspectives espoused by non-white people.

You're failing some basic logic 100 type stuff in your interpretation of your example. It does, in fact, show that blonde children like cookies. I expect if you weren't emotionally wrapped up in the situation it's acting as a metaphor for, you'd have no trouble recognizing that.

 

[Trausti]

That's what this study failed to do: It failed to provide a control group. It failed to show that this relationship is more prevalent in white people than it is in other racial groups. Without showing that, it cannot draw a conclusion about the relationship between whiteness and belief about prison policy - because it can't say that the perspectives espoused by white people are any different from the perspectives espoused by non-white people.

Not just that, but there is obvious selection bias. If this is not corrected for, the "study" is presumptively inaccurate. That, and the cohort was small and there has been no replication - the Achilles's heel of psychology "research."

 

[Emily Lake]

It would mean that the attitude has nothing at all to do with whiteness; it is irrespective of skin color. It would then mean that it is not a "white attitude" at all, but a "human" attitude.

That's what Ksen said, only with fancier words.

Black people are disproportionately represented in prison populations and white people have traditionally exerted disproportionate control over government and law. So the researchers investigated white people's attitudes about black people being in prison. Perhaps the data produced is upsetting to you without some kind of reassurance that other groups of people are just as bad, but I expect the researchers don't give a shit.

Firstly, and most importantly, you are misunderstanding the methodological critique here. What ksen said is not at all what I said.

Secondly, you're assuming an emotional reaction on my part, and you're also assuming my color - and assuming that my color is the reason for that assumed emotional reaction.

 

[Emily Lake]

You're failing some basic logic 100 type stuff in your interpretation of your example. It does, in fact, show that blonde children like cookies. I expect if you weren't emotionally wrapped up in the situation it's acting as a metaphor for, you'd have no trouble recognizing that.

Why are you assuming that I am emotionally wrapped up in the situation?

 

[laughing dog]

Let's assume that the relationship assumed is true. Let's assume that they further tested the relationship with black people and asian people and hispanic people and found that the exact same relationship held to the exact same degree.

You would then have to conclude that:

1. White people are racist against black AND
2. Hispanic people are racist against black people to the same degree AND
3. Asian people are racist against black people to the same degree AND
4. Black people are racist against black people to the same degree

Yes. Notice that does not negate the presumed finding that white people are racist against black people.

B) And you're concluding this from a study based on views about our prison system, with acknowledgement that the prison system currently incarcerates more black people than white people.

Do you see that if all 4 of the items in the list above are simultaneously true, the the conclusion of racism is unlikely to be a true conclusion drawn from factor B? In fact, if all of the races tested react to the same degree, then racism is not a likely conclusion at all. More likely, it is some other reaction at root, and the claim of "racism" is being given only because the researcher assumed it to be the case, and thus only tested white people. It is an artifact of poor researching, not a conclusion validated by research. It cannot be isolated from confounding influences.

Until you can show that all 4 of the items are simultaneously true or that they are likely to be true, your claims are mere conjectures. And there is no reason to find the any more or less convincing than other conjectures.

Because of the construction of this survey, we cannot isolate the researcher's assumption of racism from the conclusion. The researcher assumed the antecedent with the design of the study itself, and did not control for possible confounding influences. This then invalidates the findings as terminally biased.

Research design, by definition, has to design around some hypothesis. There is no basis to assume the researchers assumed racism.

It's unfortunate. I would have liked to see the results of something more robust.

B) And you're concluding this from a study based on views about our prison system, with acknowledgement that the prison system currently incarcerates more black people than white people.

Do you see that if all 4 of the items in the list above are simultaneously true, the the conclusion of racism is unlikely to be a true conclusion drawn from factor B? In fact, if all of the races tested react to the same degree, then racism is not a likely conclusion at all. More likely, it is some other reaction at root, and the claim of "racism" is being given only because the researcher assumed it to be the case, and thus only tested white people. It is an artifact of poor researching, not a conclusion validated by research. It cannot be isolated from confounding influences.

Because of the construction of this survey, we cannot isolate the researcher's assumption of racism from the conclusion. The researcher assumed the antecedent with the design of the study itself, and did not control for possible confounding influences. This then invalidates the findings as terminally biased.

It's unfortunate. I would have liked to see the results of something more robust.

The fact a study does not answer the questions you wish answered does not negate its results.

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That's what this study failed to do: It failed to provide a control group. It failed to show that this relationship is more prevalent in white people than it is in other racial groups. Without showing that, it cannot draw a conclusion about the relationship between whiteness and belief about prison policy - because it can't say that the perspectives espoused by white people are any different from the perspectives espoused by non-white people.

Not just that, but there is obvious selection bias.....

That would depend on the goal of the research. For example, if the goal was investigate whether white people were more "racist" than others, you would be correct. If the goal was to investigate the reactions of white people and only white people, you are wrong.

- - - Updated - - -

It tells us that whites are generally ok with shitty laws as long as it effects "them" more than us.

But the issue is that the study singles out "whites" as having that attitude as opposed to "people" having that attitude without doing anything to see if the white subset of people should be singled out due to this or if the white subset is exactly the same as everyone else in regards to this attitude.

Again, why are you under the presumption that a study has to answer the questions you wish answered?

 

[Emily Lake]

The fact a study does not answer the questions you wish answered does not negate its results.

Tell that to the FDA...

 

[laughing dog]

The fact a study does not answer the questions you wish answered does not negate its results.

Tell that to the FDA...

Research submitted to the FDA is done for specific reasons and have to answer specific questions. Even when the research does not address those questions, it does not negate the results.

 

[Nexus]

Why are you assuming that I am emotionally wrapped up in the situation?

This is a blame whitey/white guilt thread. A standard tactic is to accuse you of being racist/latent racist or assume you have anxiety due to not acknowledging your white privilege or white guilt.

 

[Bronzeage]

Why are you assuming that I am emotionally wrapped up in the situation?

This is a blame whitey/white guilt thread. A standard tactic is to accuse you of being racist/latent racist or assume you have anxiety due to not acknowledging your white privilege or white guilt.

If this is true, the thread is way off target. I acknowledge my white privilege and I use it as often as possible, but I'm not a racist and I don't feel guilty about anything related to this thread.

 

[Emily Lake]

Why are you assuming that I am emotionally wrapped up in the situation?

This is a blame whitey/white guilt thread. A standard tactic is to accuse you of being racist/latent racist or assume you have anxiety due to not acknowledging your white privilege or white guilt.

One need not be ignorant of one's privileges in order to understand that biased and poorly designed research does more harm than good. If we are all supposed to be intelligent, objectively honest and rational people here... shouldn't we strive for integrity in all things, not just those things that confirm our biases?

Short version: I get very dispirited by poor reasoning, poor research, and bad statistics. It makes me grumpy.

 

[The Paul]

You're failing some basic logic 100 type stuff in your interpretation of your example. It does, in fact, show that blonde children like cookies. I expect if you weren't emotionally wrapped up in the situation it's acting as a metaphor for, you'd have no trouble recognizing that.

Why are you assuming that I am emotionally wrapped up in the situation?

Because the consequences of the example are so trivially easy to understand that I refuse to believe you can't understand them and instead assume something must be preventing you from thinking clearly regarding it.

 

[Trausti]

Short version: I get very dispirited by poor reasoning, poor research, and bad statistics. It makes me grumpy.

I hear ya sister. This is a poorly conducted study which ought to offend anyone who values scientific rigor over emotion and bias.

This was the methodology:

In one experiment, a White female experimenter asked 62 White voters to watch a video that showed mug shots of male inmates. Some of the participants saw a video in which 25% of the mug shots were of Black men, while others saw a video in which 45% of the mug shots were of Black men. Participants then had an opportunity to sign a real petition supporting an amendment that would ease the severity of California's three-strikes law.

Just over half of participants who'd seen the mug shots with fewer Black men signed the petition, whereas only 27% of people who viewed the mug shots containing a higher percentage of Black inmates agreed to sign. This was the case regardless of how harsh participants thought the law was.

To determine whether fear of crime might explain these findings, Hetey and Eberhardt conducted a second experiment in which they showed 164 White New Yorkers statistics about the prison population. They read about Black inmates either in terms of the national incarceration rate (about 40%) or the New York City rate (about 60%). Next, they were asked about their support for the stop-and-frisk policy.

About 33% of the participants who saw the lower national statistic were willing to sign a petition to end the policy, but only 12% of those who saw the higher city rate of Black incarceration were willing to sign the petition.

Participants who saw the higher rate of Black incarceration were more likely to report concern over crime, which was associated with reluctance to sign the petition.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/08/140806102818.htm

So they're trying to draw a causal relationship between exposure to information (mugs shots or incarceration rates) and tendency of a white person (because they're the only bad people after all) to support punitive punishment. What's missing from the methodology is any control for those who already favored punitive measures before participating in the "study." The "study" fails to demonstrate that seeing the mug shots or being advised of incarceration rates is the reason the participants favor or disfavor three-strikes or stop and frisk. No causal relationship is demonstrated at all. Top this off with the small cohort size, and this "study" is fly-infested pile of poop.

 

[Metaphor]

So they're trying to draw a causal relationship between exposure to information (mugs shots or incarceration rates) and tendency of a white person (because they're the only bad people after all) to support punitive punishment. What's missing from the methodology is any control for those who already favored punitive measures before participating in the "study." The "study" fails to demonstrate that seeing the mug shots or being advised of incarceration rates is the reason the participants favor or disfavor three-strikes or stop and frisk. No causal relationship is demonstrated at all. Top this off with the small cohort size, and this "study" is fly-infested pile of poop.

Actually, it's an experiment, and as such a causal inference can be drawn. However, the mechanism of action is not resolved by the experiment -- that needs further investigation.

The researchers manipulated the conditions (percentage of Black faces shown/percentage of Blacks in the prison population) and (presumably) randomly assigned conditions to participants. If the participants were randomly assigned, and there is a difference between the groups on the outcome variable, it is fair to conclude the difference was due to the experimental manipulation. So yes: the more Black people White people believe are in prison, the more likely they are to endorse punitive measures. This of course relies on the participants being randomly assigned and having a large number of participants. A small number of participants means that the randomly assigned groups may be different to each other in important ways before the experiment is run.

What the experiment does not show, however, is the reason there was a difference. The experimenters hypothesis could be true, but so could a number of other hypotheses. For example, perhaps some White people are mistaken about the demography of U.S. prisons -- perhaps they think the percentage of Blacks in prison is lower than it really is. Upon hearing disconfirming information (that it's much higher than they thought), they are upset about their faulty beliefs and in this state of general upsetness they get more 'conservative'.

I could think of at least four ways the experiment could be improved

i) Change it from a fixed effects to a random effects model (e.g. randomly assign a percentage of Black faces to show to each person, say between 25% and 75%) and correlate this with the outcome

ii) Ask people, after the experiment and the attitude data are collected, what they thought the demographics of prisons were before the experiment, and see if people with larger differences between their pre-experiment beliefs and in-experiment 'facts' were more likely to endorse harsher measures

iii) Include non-Whites in the experiment to see if it is related to ingroup-outgroup bias, or universal bias against a specific group (even your own)

iv) To test the 'upsetness-makes-you-temporarily-harsher' hypothesis, ask also for other attitudinal data from the participants unrelated to the criminal justice system and see if they also make harsher responses (e.g. ask if pushing a chair over in class should get a B-grade student suspended for one day).

 

[steve_bnk]

Stereotyping is stereotyping regardless of race creed or color.

White people who allow themselves to be punked by being called white people as a pejorative are assholes...

 

[GenesisNemesis]

Bye.

 

[steve_bnk]

Sly And The Family Stone circa 1960s.

'...Don't call me nigger, whitey
Don't call me whitey, nigger..'

Words to live by. Respect is always a two way street.

The black comedians o Showtime comedy shows routinely make reference to 'white people'.

White comedians who made regular reference to black stereotypes would be attacked. black comedians do seem to get a pass.

notice that anytime there is any vague hint of a Jewish stereotype Jewish group respond vigorously.

It is ok to stereotype whites because well.... you know how those whites are....

 

[bigfield]

It is ok to stereotype whites because well.... you know how those whites are....

We are not only Evil, but worse, we are Uncool.

 

[doubtingt]

Again, why are you under the presumption that a study has to answer the questions you wish answered?

The study does not provide any information about racism. It fails to answer any meaningful question or provide any data that can be rationally interpreted with respect to any relevant theory.
To do this, it must (at minimum) include black subjects, and preferably those of several races, plus vary the race of the prisoners along more than just the the dimension of "% of blacks". Being black is objectively correlated with many other factors and most people (of all races) are aware of these correlations. Thus by varying the % of blacks in prisons, you are actually varying every single variable that is correlated with being black. IOW, its a study with countless confounds and cannot be interpreted. For example, blacks are 2-4 times more likely than whites to commit nearly every type of violent crime. However, they are not notably more likely to smoke pot. Thus, by showing more black prisoners, the researchers are implicitly manipulating whether the people who would be freed by the petition are more likely to be violent criminals rather than in prison for something like smoking pot. IOW, what the study might show is nothing other than that people attend to statistical variance and covariance in their environment and this impacts their judgments. IOW, if you were in this study, you could easily show the exact same response and the same response as the head of the KKK. Given that by any rational definition, you are much less racist than the head of the KKK, that would mean the results have nothing to do with racism per se but merely the impact of factual knowledge and the unfortunate facts that being black is highly related to a number of factors that for any rational, non-racist, non-asshole, would and should impact whether they want to release a bunch of prisoners from jail.

Not to mention, black teens and males in their 20s and 30s tend to be perceived as older than same age whites. This could even be true when blacks are doing the age estimation. Thus, by showing more black prisoners, the researchers were making subjects think that the prison population was older and people are generally less forgiving of older criminals.

 

[laughing dog]

Again, why are you under the presumption that a study has to answer the questions you wish answered?

The study does not provide any information about racism. It fails to answer any meaningful question or provide any data that can be rationally interpreted with respect to any relevant theory....

It provides some information about the reaction of white people to highlighting racism in the prison population. Most of your response echoes the complaints of other posters that the study does not address the questions you wish. From what I can tell, this study does not pretend to be definitive nor wide-ranging. The fact that its focus is narrow does not negate its findings. Perhaps someone will come up with a differently structured study that will negate those findings.

In my experience, there are few, if any, studies in the social science that someone cannot find something to quibble or criticize.

 

[doubtingt]

The study does not provide any information about racism. It fails to answer any meaningful question or provide any data that can be rationally interpreted with respect to any relevant theory....

It provides some information about the reaction of white people to highlighting racism in the prison population.

Exactly what information is that? That white people are aware of the objective factors that are associated with black people in prison? It certainly does not support the OPs racist claim that "White people are assholes" or any other negative interpretation of the respondents in the study, unless you count being rationally sensitive to objective facts a negative trait.

Most of your response echoes the complaints of other posters that the study does not address the questions you wish. From what I can tell, this study does not pretend to be definitive nor wide-ranging. The fact that its focus is narrow does not negate its findings.

Its findings have no meaning and are equally compatible with countless mutually conflicting theories, therefore "negating" the findings is rather pointless since the findings don't have a point to begin with.
Imagine a study finds that a cocktail of 50 drugs has a net positive impact compared to no drugs at all, on the health of a select group of people who who are all decathlon athletes. The study is next to meaningless, some of the drugs could be very dangerous on their own, the effects could be the opposite for average people, there is no theoretical utility of the results. Yet, none of these critiques, "negate its findings".

In my experience, there are few, if any, studies in the social science that someone cannot find something to quibble or criticize.

This is not a minor quibble. Its a worthless study from which nothing can be inferred about the causes of human psychology or anything related to theories of racism. The fact that this journal chose to publish it, reveals its sadly low scientific standards (at minimum) and more likely its strong ideological bias to publish anything claiming evidence for racism, given that this journal likely rejects far superior and more informative studies that are not about racism. Such lousy and weak methodology that undermines any interpretation might be par for the course in research claiming to show racism, but its far below the standard in most decent psych journals on other topics.