According to psychology study.

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Report: Prejudice Linked to Low IQ

According to psychology study.

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Report: Prejudice Linked to Low IQ

According to psychology study.

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Report: Prejudice Linked to Low IQ

I have this game I play when I meet college students. “What’s your major?” I ask. The student might say, “English,” “psychology,” “political science” or “engineering.” And then, in my mind, after factoring in some other information, I say to myself “job” or “no job,” depending on the major. Read full article > >

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Not all college majors are created equal

I have this game I play when I meet college students. “What’s your major?” I ask. The student might say, “English,” “psychology,” “political science” or “engineering.” And then, in my mind, after factoring in some other information, I say to myself “job” or “no job,” depending on the major. Read full article > >

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Not all college majors are created equal

Thanking people is good manners — at least that’s what I’ve tried to impress on my kids — but it may also lead to better, healthier lives. “We know that grateful kids are happier [and] more satisfied with their lives,” says Jeffrey Froh, an assistant professor of psychology at Hofstra University who focuses on the topic . “They report better relationships with friends and family, higher GPAs, less materialism, less envy and less depression, along with a desire to connect to their community and to want to give back.” He adds that there’s an even larger field of research on adults showing that being thankful has numerous psychological, social and even physical benefits such as lower blood pressure. Read full article > >

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Teaching kids to be grateful may have long-term benefits even though it’s not easy

Thanking people is good manners — at least that’s what I’ve tried to impress on my kids — but it may also lead to better, healthier lives. “We know that grateful kids are happier [and] more satisfied with their lives,” says Jeffrey Froh, an assistant professor of psychology at Hofstra University who focuses on the topic . “They report better relationships with friends and family, higher GPAs, less materialism, less envy and less depression, along with a desire to connect to their community and to want to give back.” He adds that there’s an even larger field of research on adults showing that being thankful has numerous psychological, social and even physical benefits such as lower blood pressure. Read full article > >

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Teaching kids to be grateful may have long-term benefits even though it’s not easy

So my post on the liberal slant in academia has garnered what I believe to be a record number of comments, many, even most of them, pretty angry.  And as I predicted, the positions are very much reversed from the normal take on such things.  Conservatives are explaining how bias can be subtle and yet insidious; and liberal, many of them academics are saying that you can’t simply infer bias from statistical underrepresentation, and sarcastically demanding to know whether I really think that people are asking candidates for physics professorships who they voted for in the last election. They’re all right, of course: you can’t simply infer bias from statistical underrepresentation, and yet bias can be subtle and yet insidious.  I thought it might clarify the argument a bit to outline how I think bias works in institutions, even though much of it should be old hat, particularly for social scientists. Most people, when they are accused of being a member of an in-group that is excluding some other set of people, immediately define bias in the narrowest possible terms:  conscious, direct personal discrimination.  Did we make an explicit rule that no person of that persuasion could be hired?  No we didn’t.  Well, then, no bias! Those people offered their own alternate theories, which boiled down to: Smart people are almost always liberal Curiousity and interest in ideas is a liberal trait Conservatives are too rigid and authoritarian to maintain the open mind required of a professor Education erases false conservative ideas and turns people into liberals Conservatives don’t want to be professors because they’re more interested in something else (money, the military) Conservatives don’t want to be professors because they’re anti-intellectual Conservatives hold false beliefs that make them ineligible to be professors Some of these ideas are more plausible than others.  But I’m in the “left” camp on this: while there are certainly reasons to punish this sort of very overt discrimination more harshly than other sorts, that doesn’t mean that once you’ve done away with the actual litmus test,  (or confirmed that you never had one) you cease to have a problem.  That shouldn’t be controversial for either the liberals or the conservatives in this argument.  Lets review all of the different ways that bias can operate in a group: Covert personal discrimination :  we know what this looks like:  ”No Irish need apply”.  Someone in the group doesn’t want blacks, women, fat people, etc around them.  They aren’t going to say so, because it’s nominally taboo, but they are going to knowingly blackball anyone in the disdained category–or indeed, anyone they suspec t might belong. Unconscious personal discrimination :  this happens when you don’t realize that you’re letting your discomfort with some characteristic–whether it be race, weight, or voter registration–cause you to blackball an otherwise worthy candidate.  Academics in the comment threads assured me that they were smart, open-minded, and tolerant, and that all they cared about was ideas.   But it’s never that simple–which is why, to the disgust of many of my frustrated readers, I will not endorse their assertions that the Tea Party is obviously a bunch of illiterate thugs who are trying to scare ordinary Americans into silence, or that anti-war protesters didn’t really care about the war, they just hated America.  Even if I were tempted to agree with either of these sentiments, research shows that our interpretation of the motives of others is very dependent on  whether they agree or disagree with us ideologically .   Both liberals and conservatives do this, and the people studied were almost certainly bright Yale students, so don’t think that this must be a signature vice of other, dumber people than you.   And perversely, the more you think you are just deciding on the objective facts, like the quality of their work, the more possible it is that you are actually discriminating; research finds that people are  most likely to discriminate  on the basis of both politics and race when they have some other information with which to generate a plausible excuse. Studies have shown that racism is so socially proscribed that people exhibit it nowadays only when they can plausibly deny–to themselves and to others–that they are biased. One meta-analysis of studies, for example, found that “discrimination against blacks was more likely to occur when potential helpers had more opportunities to rationalize decisions not to help” by invoking “justifiable explanations having nothing to do with race.” Munro, Lasane, and Leary found the same pattern of behavior in partisanship. The partisan college evaluators were willing to acknowledge that applicants they chose who shared their political loyalties had lower test scores–an objective fact–but they selected the candidates anyway by inflating the importance of the recommendation letters that came with applications. Accepting candidates merely on the basis of low test scores would have shown the evaluators were biased. Accepting candidates on the basis of recommendation letters–and arguing the letters were more important than scores–allowed the evaluators to plausibly deny that they were biased. Introspection is thus not an adequate method for evaluating whether discrimination happens. Stereotyping  People assume that if you’re a member of some group, you probably have some trait that they have (accurately or not) associated with that group.  Thus, the astronomy department at the University of Kentucky apparently decided that anyone who attempted to reconcile Genesis with recent astronomical findings might well be a creationist.  They didn’t hire him, even though he says he’s a believer in standard evolution.  Reverse bias :  The out-group reacts to discrimination by refusing to join the in-group, and punishing those who do: “don’t act white”, “what, you think you’re better than us?”, “Professors are a bunch of self-satisfied hacks–who’d want to be one?”  They thus self-select out of the hiring pool. I don’t have to tell you that this sort of discrimination operates not just in interviews, but before and after: who does well in school, who gets selected for promotion or tenure. But of course, institutions can be biased too.  Institutional arrangements can exacerbate individual bias, but they can also have structural features of their own that enhance it.  Numerically, the more people there are of a given persuasion, the more likely it is that at least one of them is going to discriminate against others.  The more skewed, the more likely–you have a cosy group dynamic that an outsider would disrupt, and you’re more likely to develop a shared understanding that, well, you guys are better than other people. A very tight job market is also going to make things worse.  The more candidates you have for the fewer jobs, the more eager you are to find reasons to get rid of otherwise qualified candidates.  I don’t have to tell academics that their job market is about as brutal as it gets.   But the problems can go beyond this into institutional bias , which I also called structural bias in my original post.  These are systemic characteristics of an institution that cause it to discriminate against out groups.  Sometimes these features are even valid–personally, I’m not sure I favor relaxing the size and strength rules for firefighters so that more women and shorter minorities will pass the exam.  Live survivors of fires seem more important than parity.   However, there are institutional biases that are, to put it mildly, much more problematic.  I’ll take a stab at listing many of them, most offensive to least: Hostile work environmen t:  the group is actively hostile to you, ranging from behavior clearly designed to get you to leave, to disparaging remarks and demands that you account for anything bad recently done by a member of [insert group here] Inhospitable work environment:   the group has a common bond that excludes you.  Often this means it’s hard to get ahead–for example, a firm I worked for regularly took clients to strip clubs.  Since managers were supposed to groom clients, women didn’t end up as senior managers. Covering:    Ann Althouse’s review of Kenji Yoshino’s terrific book on the topic described this best: “Nevertheless, when he returns to Yale as a professor and deputy dean, he still feels the need to play down his sexual orientation. He avoids “gay examples” when teaching constitutional law. He attends law school functions without bringing the man he is dating. And he takes it to heart when a colleague remarks that he should be a “homosexual professional” and not a “professional homosexual. . .  Despite coming out to his friends, his parents and his colleagues, Yoshino still feels afflicted by the pressure to act as though being gay does not have much effect on his life. That is, he is required to “cover.”  In order to survive, you must hide parts of your life that other people get to integrate with their work persona; if you’re not willing to do this, you may be penalized–or you may decide not to risk it. Affinity bias :  People like people who are like them.  They collect subordinates or students with whom they have common bonds.  They mentor those people, help them move up through the system, reproduce themselves throughout the organization.  People can’t control this, really, but it makes a big difference. Social Capital   Organizations naturally recruit from people who are close to the organization–if your friends and relatives do it, you understand the system, and it seems comforting and familiar rather than strange and scary. Those relationships often also give you an entree into the system. Hidden tripwires  Usually the dominant group doesn’t even realize they are there. For example, the low pay (and increasing reliance on unpaid internships for entree) of journalism often excludes people who don’t have, at the minimum, a family that could take them in and help cover the bills if disaster struck.  It’s not surprising that the profession is so predominantly white and affluent even though everyone talks a lot about diversity. As you can see, there are a lot of ways short of covert discrimination that a system can shut out diversity.   So what’s happening in academia?  Is it simply that conservatives are less interested or qualified, or are being turned into liberals by the process of education, as my interlocutors have argued, or is there more going on here? The evidence offered for proposition that it’s all the hiring pool is pretty weak.  There’s an awful lot of gross stereotyping: there are no conservatives because creationists can’t be professors; because conservatives are hostile to new ideas; because reflective thinking inevitably turns you into a liberal.   Yet many of these are clearly generated by consulting lurid mental images of conservatives generated in liberal web fora, not any reliable data.  For example, multiple people argued that conservatives probably weren’t in academia because they liked money and power, which caused them to abandon academia for think tanks.  This is an obviously crazy statement to anyone who knows anything about conservative think tanks, which may pay already famous people well, but which are not really that much more lucrative than professorships for the analysts who exit grad school to toil in their research arms.  And the think tankers don’t get tenure. Even if some of the theorized traits do recur at a higher frequency in the group–as creationism, obviously does–it’s mindless prejudice to generalize from many to all.  And that’s the kind of generality you’d need to explain a 266-to-1 disparity in social psychology , given that the population is 40% conservative and only 20% liberal.  In the professorship as a whole, the breakdown seems to be about 80% liberal-to-center-left, 20% everything else, which is still a remarkable skew.   Blacks are slightly more likely than Republicans to attend church weekly, and black churches are about as likely as white evangelical churches to be creationist.  Yet if someone told you that the reason there are too few black professors is that creationists don’t make good professors, you’d think they were bonkers. Of course, one might argue that we know blacks have been discriminated against, and can presume that this persists.  Of course this is true.  My point is that just because you can generate a story to explain the skew towards liberalism, does not mean that this story is particularly convincing. One of the things the legacy of racism has taught us is just how good dominant groups are at constructing narratives that justify their dominance.  Somehow, the problem is never them.  It’s always the out group.  Maybe the out group has some special characteristic that makes them not want to be admitted to the circle–blacks are happy-go-lucky and don’t want the responsibility of management, women wouldn’t deign to sully themselves in commerce, Jews are too interested in money to want to attend Harvard or go into public service.  These explanations always oddly ignore the fact that many members of the out-group are complaining about being excluded. More troubling is that these volitional arguments are almost always combined with denigration: the out group is stupid, greedy, mean, violent, overemotional, corrupt . . . whatever. As indeed these arguments are when they’re deployed against conservatives in my comment threads.  In fact, it seems clear to me that many commenters have taken the underrepresentation of conservatives in academia as vindication of their beliefs–if conservatives can’t make it in academia, that proves that conservatives are not smart, and liberal ideas must be better.  This is possible, of course.  It’s also possible that academics are validating their own bias by systematically excluding those who disagree with them. So while in theory, it’s true that you can’t simply reason from disparity to bias, I have to say that when you’ve identified a statistical disparity, and the members of the in-group immediately rush to assure you that this isn’t because of bias, but because the people they’ve excluded are all a bunch of raging assholes with lukewarm IQ’s . . . well, I confess, discrimination starts sounding pretty plausible. When that group of people is assuring you that the reason conservatives can’t be in charge is that they do not have open minds . . . when the speed and sloppiness of their argument make it quite clear that they rejected the very possibility of discrimination without giving it even a second’s serious thought . . . well, I confess, it starts sounding very plausible.  More plausible than I, who had previously leaned heavily on things like affinity bias to explain the skew, would have thought. Moreover, what evidence we have does not particularly support many of the alternative theories. For example, the liberal skew is strongest at elite universities.  This is not consistent with the notion that education is turning all the conservatives into liberals, or that they’re not interested in becoming professors.  I’d say it’s more consistent with the possibility that they’re disproportionately having a hard time getting hired, or retained. And the skew goes way back–it shows up during the Eisenhower administration, and seems to have been locked in during the mid-1970s.  That’s not really consistent with a story about how Republican anti-intellectualism has driven professors out of the conservative camp.  It’s rather more consistent with conservatives reacting to exclusion by becoming anti-intellectual, though I don’t know that this is actually the case. And with apologies to all the brilliant, open-minded, scientifically grounded liberal academics who suggested this one, it’s also not because academia simply weeds out illogical people who can’t handle the scientific method.  Professors are overwhelmingly pro-choice, pro-gay-marriage, anti-military, and in favor of redistribution and regulation programs.  These aren’t a matter of logic and scientific evidence; they’re value judgements.  Moreover, they cluster in a way that suggests something other than rational analysis driving the decision–why should your views on military operations in Iraq, or climate change, be correlated with your views on abortion? Note that this also excludes the thesis that professors aren’t really that liberal, but just self-identify that way because conservatives are so terribly anti-intellectual.  Professors are mostly of one mind on most of the major liberal political issues. There are some theories I find more plausible; Jonathan Haidt notes that conservatives tend (on average) to score lower on certain personality traits that may be required in an academic–though even then, I’d note that tests designed by liberals are going to implicitly validate liberal norms.  And, of course, there are skews in places like the military, though not as strong ones; if one profession skews one way, then definitionally, some other profession has to skew in the opposite direction. But overall, it seems unlikely to me that the skew we’re seeing is simply a result of conservatives all suddenly wanting to be elsewhere for the last thirty years.  I find it even less likely that it’s simply because all conservatives are idiots, or uneducated. But is this even a problem?  Do conservatives have a right to a place in academia?  There are three potential arguments for why it’s a problem.  One if the harm it does to conservatives.  But the others are the harm it does to academia, and to the rest of us.  I think the latter are by far the bigger problems.  Not to trivialize the conundrum faced by conservatives who want to be professors . . . but it’s not like they’re ending up as longshoremen.  The other two problems are much more broadly harmful. Excluding conservatives means that academia is losing the trust of the more conservative members of society.  Academics are incredulous and angry about this–the way that many whites are when they hear rumors are spreading in the black community that AIDS was deliberately created and released by the government to destroy them. But the mistrust of the government in the black community is not crazy–not after things like the Tuskeegee Syphilis experiment.  Nor is it crazy to think that academia wields its prestige like a club against conservative ideas–or even conservatives themselves, as with the steady stream of studies that characterize conservatives as authoritarian, less open to experience, and so forth.  Conservatives point out that the questions are more than occasionally loaded, and the studies are done on psychology students, an overwhelmingly liberal group whose few conservatives may not look much like conservatives in the wild.  Yet the academics in question more than occasionally participate in the denigrating connotations this information is given in the media. Which hints at the other problem with excluding conservatives: it makes scholarship worse.  Unless we assume what to many liberals is “proven” by their predominance in academia–that conservative ideas have no merit–leaving conservatives out means that important viewpoints are excluded.  We are never the best interrogators of our ideas.  It requires motivated critics to lay bare our hidden assumptions, our misreading of the data, our factual inaccuracies.  No matter how scrupulously honest you try to be, you are no substitute for an irritated opponent thinking, “That can’t possibly be right!” If you build a group with the same assumptions, you can all too easily go wrong. Moreover, as Haidt points out, that group develops sacred taboos that can’t be violated.  If facts threaten the sacred space, facts get jettisoned.  Think of the creationist museum–or Larry Summers getting attacked by a swarm of angry critics for suggesting that it was possible that inborn differences in the distribution of intelligence might explain why men–who have a higher observed variance in math ability–are more likely to be found in the sciences. Now, Summers could be wrong—as I say, I am inherently suspicious of narratives that offer neat explanations for why the dominant position of one group can’t be changed.  But the critics did not rush to explain why this was unlikely to be right.  They furiously rushed to punish him for having said it.  They were angry about sexism, not science. Yet one more reason why I am suspicious that liberals’ unshakeable commitment to scientific rigor is what forces them to exclude conservatives tainted by association with creationism. I don’t say this to denigrate liberals–obviously, conservatives have their taboos too.  But it’s healthier if different groups, with different taboos, all have a place in the quest for truth.  Monoculture is as unhealthy for ideas as it is for agriculture.  

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What Does Bias Look Like?

A multifaceted video artist explores the communicative effects of light by Ikechukwu Onyewuenyi Mentioning an artist in the same breath as Jeremy Blake isn’t something to take lightly, but New York-based video artist, Jakob LeBaron Dwight’s current solo show at L.A.’s Papillion Institute of Arts proves the comparison holds up. With multifaceted training as philosopher, painter and videographer, his studies have converged into a body of work that’s imbued with a sense of organic experimentalism both deeply personal and with psychic overtones. Dwight’s exploration using light as a medium is a through-line in his video installations, seizing on the “strong pathway already set up in our brains for illuminated imagery and information” to rewire our existing schema of light patterns on screen. In talking with the artist about the show and his works, it became clear that it’s not so much that Dwight is criticizing the banal utility of light in the present digital age (as he relies on the very medium), but more that he pushes people to “discover what communicative effects it may have in the realm or context of abstraction and the art experience, or even in the area of healing and psychology.” For example, a piece like “Black Mirror” (above) provides ample space for the viewer to project their own emotions and ideas. Watching it left me in a transcendental space, reliving fond memories of my aunt’s African bazaar littered with Kente, Adire, bogolan and many more textiles. I saw myself in that visual tessellation and it felt wholesome. Following the successful launch of his multi-disciplinary event JLD Studio at NYC’s White Box gallery space last year, his current show positions his conceptually palliative video work as a novel way to anticipate the function of light in society. The solo exhibit is on view through 27 February 2010 at Papillion Institute of Art .

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Jakob LeBaron Dwight

I’m not surprised that John Tierney’s new article on Jonathan Haidt has gotten a lot of attention from conservatives; it involves a liberal academic telling them something they already know: that academia discriminates against them. He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three. “This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. In his speech and in an interview, Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals. “Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation,” said Dr. Haidt, who called himself a longtime liberal turned centrist. “But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.” In blog years, this is an age-old argument.  I find it particularly intriguing because it completely reverses the standard argument about discrimination.  Conservatives are usually reluctant to agree that women and minorities are still often victims of structural or personal bias–despite numerical underrepresentation and some fairly compelling studies  showing that hiring is not race or gender blind.  Yet when it comes to conservatives in academia, they suddenly sound like sociologists, discussing hostile work environment, the role of affinity networks in excluding out groups, unconscious bias, and the compelling evidence from statistical underrepresentation. Meanwhile, liberals, who are usually quick to assume that underrepresentation represents some form of discrimination–structural or personal–suddenly become, as Haidt notes, fierce critics of the notion that numerical representation means anything.  Moreover, they start generating explanations for the disparity that sound suspiciously like some old reactionary explaining that blacks don’t really want to go into management because they’re much happier without all the responsibility.  Conservatives are too stupid to become academics; they aren’t open new ideas; they’re too aggressive and hierarchical; they don’t care about ideas, just money.  In other words, it’s not our fault that they’re not worthy.  Besides, liberals suddenly argue, we shouldn’t look for every sub-population to mirror the composition of the population at large; just as Greeks gravitated towards diners in 1980s New York, and the small market business was dominated by kKoreans, liberals are attracted to academia, and conservatives to, well, some other profession.  Today Paul Krugman writes : Every once in a while you get stories like this one, about the underrepresentation of conservatives in academics, that treat ideological divides as being somehow equivalent to racial differences. This is a really, really bad analogy. And it’s not just the fact that you can choose your ideology, but not your race. Ideologies have a real effect on overall life outlook, which has a direct impact on job choices. Military officers are much more conservative than the population at large; so? (And funny how you don’t see opinion pieces screaming “bias” and demanding an effort to redress the imbalance.) I have no idea what distinction one is supposed to make between beliefs and something you “can’t change”.  Could Paul Krugman become a devout Baptist and a supply sider tomorrow, if the financial incentives were right?  I devoutly hope not.  I presume that Paul Krugman holds the beliefs he does because they are his best guess at what is true, and that he could no more change his beliefs than he could change his native language.  It is easier (in most cases) to pretend different ideas than a different race–but we rightly think that it was horrific to force blacks to “pass” as a condition of being treated like a full human being.  That era imposed terrible costs on those who passed, and a cost to society, in the form of lost diversity. Beyond that, the comparison to the military doesn’t really work.   When you click the link, you don’t find a military that’s wildly more conservative than the public at large.  Surveys regularly find that around 80% of professors vote mostly Democratic, where  somewhere around 45% of American voters lean Democratic ; and 9% of professors vote mostly Republican, while about 45% of Americans lean that way.   In the latest Gallup poll, about 28% of voters directly identify with each party in the latest survey, though historically Democrats have been about 5-7 points higher. By contrast, in the military, according to Krugman’s link, 41% of the troops identify as Republicans (down from 62% just seven years ago), while 32% identify as independent, and presumably, 27% identify as Democrats. In other words, a professor is almost twice as likely to support the Democratic party as a member of the general population, and about 80% less likely to support the GOP.  By contrast, a military officer is about 40% more likely to identify as a Republican as someone in the general population, and about as likely to identify as a Democrat.  In fact, the only profession I could find that skews 80% towards Republicans is Southern Baptist ministers .  I suspect both professors and ministers would resent the comparison. Professors might rightly rejoinder that no one’s demanding that the Southern Baptist Conference start recruiting liberals to balance things out.  I’m not sure this is quite true, actually, as there are quite a lot of liberal baptists attached to the American Baptist conference, and probably even some within the Southern conference who would like to move it to the left.  But certainly, I don’t know many professors who are demanding some sort of liberal baptist affirmative action. On the other hand, I don’t actually know many conservatives who want quotas for conservatives, either–I’m sure they’re out there, but even David Horowitz didn’t go that far . Most of the people I talk to think, like James Joyner, that this may be a problem without a solution .  It is just my impression, but I think what conservatives want most of all is simply recognition that they are being shut out.  It is a double indignity to be discriminated against, and then be told unctuously that your group’s underrepresentation is proof that almost none of you are as good as “us”.  Haidt notes that his correspondence with conservative students (anonymously) “reminded him of closeted gay students in the 1980s”: He quoted — anonymously — from their e-mails describing how they hid their feelings when colleagues made political small talk and jokes predicated on the assumption that everyone was a liberal. “I consider myself very middle-of-the-road politically: a social liberal but fiscal conservative. Nonetheless, I avoid the topic of politics around work,” one student wrote. “Given what I’ve read of the literature, I am certain any research I conducted in political psychology would provide contrary findings and, therefore, go unpublished. Although I think I could make a substantial contribution to the knowledge base, and would be excited to do so, I will not.” Beyond that, mostly they would like academics to be conscious of the bias, and try to counter it where possible.  As the quote above suggests, this isn’t just for the benefit of conservatives, either.  Just as excluding blacks and women from academia by tacit agreement allowed for a certain amount of wrong-headed groupthink, so does excluding people with different political views.  No, I’m not saying you have to hire a Young Earth Creationist to be a biology professor, but I don’t see why it should matter in a professor of Mathematics or Sociology. Trying to be more conscious of one’s own bias, and even to attempt to work against it, should not be such a hard task for people as brilliant, open-minded, and committed to equality and social justice as I keep hearing that l iberal academics are .  So it doesn’t really seem like so much to ask. Update : A commenter points out that I misread Paul Krugman; he was referring only to officers.   According to the Huffington Post on the same survey “These Military Times survey results show that support for the Republican Party among senior members of the Army, the group most likely to identify as Republican, declined significantly between 2004 and 2006 before leveling off at about 49% in 2007. Also interesting is that the data show no corresponding change in support for the Democratic Party.” So a skew of about 66%–but still not nearly as large as the skew in academia, where registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans something like five to one.

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Unbiasing Academia

The mass shootings in Tucson over the weekend led to all sorts of exercises in arm-chair psychology. The media was quick to portray the shooter Jared Lee Loughner as unhinged and paranoid, digging up his Internet ravings and probing former friends and classmates for detailed testimonials of his bizarre statements and aggressive behavior. And, following its polarization meme, we were subjected to endless accounts of how America’s heated and “vitriolic” political climate helped to trigger such action. But what can psychology tell us about the specific ways that regional, locational, and geographic factors can affect gun violence and mass shootings in particular? I was surprised by what I found out when I asked my colleague Jason Rentfrow , the distinguished social psychologist at Cambridge University, about this. While some continue to attribute gun violence and mass shootings to hot climates in the U.S. and elsewhere — “Living in a hot and uncomfortable climate makes people irritable and rates of violence go up,” Rentfrow summarizes — the preponderance of studies focus on a “culture of honor” that is especially pervasive in Southern and Western states. This is something that pundits and commentators need to take a good deal more seriously because, if it is correct, and a considerable body of research suggests that it is, it suggests that deep-seated regional and cultural factors play a substantial role in mass violence. The classic study of the subject is by Richard Nisbett , a social psychologist at the University of Michigan. In his paper “Violence and Regional Culture,” published in the American Psychologist in 1993, Nisbett examined the higher rate of violence in the U.S. south, which he notes has been established since the time of revolution. After considering possible explanations having to do with poverty, slavery, and even the region’s hotter climate, he found a different answer in a cultural vestige of pastoralism: a deep “culture of honor” in which residents place an extraordinary value on personal reputation, family, and property. Threats to these things provoke aggressive reactions, leading to higher rates of murder and domestic violence. Here is how Nisbett himself explains it: Southerners do not endorse violence in the abstract more than do Northerners, nor do they endorse violence in all specific forms of circumstances. Rather, they are more likely to endorse violence as an appropriate response to insults, as a means of self protection, and as a socialization tool in training children. This is the characteristic cultural pattern of herding societies the world over. Consistent with the culture-of-honor interpretation, it is argument-related and not felony-related homicide that is more common in the South… There is another sense in which the culture of honor might turn out to be self-sustaining or even capable of expanding into mainstream culture. The culture is a variant of warrior culture the world over, and its independent invention countless times (Gilmore, 1990), combined with the regularities in its themes having to do with glorification of masculine attributes, suggests that it may be a particularly alluring stance that may  be capable of becoming functionally autonomous. Many observers (e.g., Naipaul, 1989; Shattuck, 1989) have noted that contemporary Southern backcountry culture, including music, dress, and social  stance, is spreading beyond its original geographical confines and becoming a part of the fabric of rural, and even urban, working-class America. Perhaps for the young males who adopt it, this culture provides a romantic veneer to everyday existence. If so, it is distinctly possible that the violence characteristic of this culture is also spreading beyond its confines. An understanding of the culture  and its darker side would thus remain important for the foreseeable future. Rentfrow also pointed me to a more recent study by Ryan P. Brown , Lindsey Osterman , and Collin  Barnes of the University of Oklahoma, published in Psychological Science in 2009, which reinforces Nisbett’s findings and suggests that the culture of honor plays a particularly significant role in high school violence. The study found that the culture of honor to be significantly associated with two indices of school violence: the percentage of high school students who reported having brought a weapon to school during the past month; and the prevalence of actual school shootings over a 20 year period. The authors summarize their key findings this way: Some researchers have suggested that the apparent relationship between general acts of violence and the culture of honor in the United States might be at least partially explained by demographic differences between Southern and Western states, on the one hand, and Northern and Eastern states, on the other, rather than being a product of cultural differences (Anderson & Anderson, 1996). Indeed, culture-of-honor states are typically hotter, more rural, and poorer than non-culture-of-honor states, and any of these differences might explain the link between culture of honor and violence. However, the state-level demographic variables that we examined–  which included temperature, rurality, social composition, and indices of economic and social insecurity–were unable to account for the association between culture of honor and our school-violence indicators, and also were inconsistent predictors of the school-violence variables across the two studies. This marks an important difference between these indicators of school violence and more general indicators of violent crime among adults, which typically show stronger and more consistent associations with temperature, rurality, and environmental-insecurity measures similar to the ones we used (Anderson, 1989; Baron & Straus, 1988; Cohen, 1996; Lee, Bankston, Hayes, & Thomas, 2007). This difference suggests that school violence is a somewhat  distinct form of aggression that should not be viewed through  standard lenses. That the culture of honor appears to be such a robust predictor of school violence supports the hypothesis that school violence might be partially a product of long-term or recent experiences of social marginalization, humiliation,  rejection, or bullying (Leary et al., 2003; Newman et al., 2005),   all of which represent honor threats with special significance to  people (particularly males) living in culture-of-honor states. I am amazed how well this explanation seems to fit the emerging facts and context of the mass violence in Tucson. I don’t mean the obvious fact that the shooting happened in a Sunbelt city — Tucson is a sophisticated college town, not the sort of rural backwater Nisbett had in mind. It is the nature of the culture of honor itself  and the way it acts on and through marginalized young males, just like Loughner. The culture of honor, as Nisbett describes it, sees violence as an “appropriate response to insults” and as “a means of self-protection.” Numerous media reports note that Loughner grew more obsessed with Congresswoman Giffords after he felt she did not give him a respectful answer to the question he asked her at an earlier forum. Then there are the results of the University of Oklahoma study which finds the culture of honor to be a particularly robust predictor of high school violence, especially among young males who have been marginalized, bullied, rejected, or faced other ”honor threats.” And, Nisbett’s some two-decades-old warning that the culture of honor is not something that is necessarily geographically bounded but seems to spreading into broader aspects of young male working-class enclaves in both urban and rural communities is as prescient as it is chilling. My next post will cover the social, economic, political, and cultural as well as psychological factors that are associated with gun violence and firearm deaths across the 50 U.S. states.

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The Psychogeography of Gun Violence

Turns out you might not be paranoid if you think people are reading your mind. A new study in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, a respected publication, says extrasensory perception, or ESP, is more real than previously thought. The…

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Is ESP Real After All?

We have all known people (some of whom we may be related to, or voted for) who act as if they’re the sole expert on a topic. Churchill described them well: “They won’t change their minds and they won’t change the topic.” The personality trait that drives their adamant, rigid certainty doesn’t come under the radar of mainstream media – not even during elections when we should be most vigilant of its presence. read more

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Beyond a Shadow of Doubt: Political Certainty in Uncertain Times

This article titled “Freedom is not found online” was written by Aditya Chakrabortty, for The Guardian on Tuesday 30th March 2010 06.00 UTC

There’s something about the internet that can move even the most monosyllabic politician to flights of visionary rhetoric. “Imagine if the internet took hold in China,” said George W Bush in 1999, sounding like a knock-off John Lennon. “Imagine how freedom would spread.”

It turns out he was wrong on that one, too. After four years of running a search engine in China, Google last week relocated it to Hong Kong. On the Chinese mainland, Google had been self-censoring search results to keep on the right side of the Communist party; now that it has moved offshore the entire service will face interruptions from the Great Firewall – a massive, sophisticated system that monitors Chinese surfing of any websites outside the domestic internet. What you’re seeing here is not just the humbling of the Don’t-Be-Evil brigade; it’s yet another defeat of the idea that to bring democracy to foreign dictatorships, you simply add the internet.

Bush isn’t the only world leader who believed this. There was Bill Clinton, who famously argued that “trying to control the internet is like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall”. And Gordon Brown, who told this paper last summer that Twitter, blogging and all the rest meant “you cannot have Rwanda again”, because word would spread so quickly. And behind the prime ministers and presidents were enough new-media visionaries to fill a dozen wi-fi enabled Starbucks, all preaching the gospel of a borderless internet and free expression for all.

Cyber-utopians, Evgeny Morozov calls them – and the internet scholar admits he used to be one. A few years ago, he worked for a non-profit organisation that promoted web-based journalism in his home of Belarus and other authoritarian parts of the former Soviet bloc. “We wanted more young people in politics,” he says. “They ended up going to prison instead.” A cheap way of building a new civic society was no match for the old repressive structures of the state.

That has become the theme of Morozov’s work. Now an academic in the US, he has plenty of examples of how Beijing, Tehran and Moscow are adapting the internet for their own purposes. He quotes the example of the “Fifty-cent” bloggers in China, so called not because of their fondness for over-muscled American rappers but because of the money they earn for each pro-government blog they post on internet forums. He describes how the clerics of Qom in Iran are now recruiting and training religious bloggers; while the secret police in Tehran find Twitter and Facebook very useful tools for keeping tabs on dissidents.

New means of communication usually excite heady talk about how they will bring about big social changes. As Tom Standage observes in his book The Victorian Internet, the fact that the telegraph allowed people in different continents to communicate almost instantaneously gave rise to predictions that there would never be another international conflict. There then followed two world wars.

Developed in California, the web is often seen as the repository of similarly sunny liberal values. This paper’s coverage last week of the Google case ran under the logo “CHINA V THE WEB” – as if the internet were a sovereign state or a moral philosophy rather than a technology that people use to download porn, or watch videos of a cat playing the piano.

Like all mass technologies, the web is a force for change – primarily because it makes it cheaper and easier than ever before for people to communicate with each other. But there’s nothing that says the change has to be good or bad, or how far it needs to go. The answers to those questions won’t be found on Google.

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This article titled “Autism can be diagnosed with brain scan – study” was written by Alok Jha, for The Guardian on Tuesday 10th August 2010 21.01 UTC

A simple 15-minute brain scan could help doctors diagnose people with autism by identifying structural differences in their brains. Scientists say the scans would speed up what is currently a long and emotional diagnostic procedure and allow the identification of at-risk children more rapidly.

“We know already that people with autism have differences in brain anatomy and some regions are just bigger and smaller or just different in shape,” said Christine Ecker of King’s College Institute of Psychiatry in London. “Our technique can use this information to identify someone with autism.”

Autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) is a lifelong condition caused by abnormalities in the development of the brain that affects around half a million people in the UK. The vast majority of these are male, and diagnosis usually involves a lengthy process of interviews and personal accounts from family and friends close to the patient.

Medical researchers at the IoP compared the brain scans of 20 adults with autism against those of 20 adults without. They found significant differences in the thickness of tissue in parts of the grey matter in areas of the frontal and parietal lobes which are responsible for functions including behaviour and language.

In the experiment, Ecker showed that her imaging technique was able to detect which people in her group had autism, with 90% accuracy. “If we get a new case, we will also hopefully be 90% accurate,” she said. The research, supported by the Medical Research Council, Wellcome Trust and National Institute for Health Research, is published today in the Journal of Neuroscience.

Declan Murphy, professor of psychiatry and brain maturation at the IoP said the new method would help people with ASD to be diagnosed more quickly and cost effectively. “Most importantly, their diagnosis will be based on an objective “biomarker” and not simply on the opinion of a clinician, which is formed after an interview. Simply being diagnosed means patients can take the next steps to get help and improve their quality of life.”

Uta Frith, emeritus professor of cognitive development at University College London’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, said: “This study shows that the subtle brain abnormalities associated with autism show a distinctive pattern. However, it will need many more studies before the technique used in this study can be used for diagnosis. It is crucial that we learn more about what the brain abnormalities mean. The authors in the paper itself say their results are preliminary and serve as ‘proof of concept’ rather than a definitive means of diagnosis.”

Ecker found there was a correlation between the severity of a person’s autism and the amount of structural difference observed in their brain scans, compared with the control group. “We can see that, on the basis of the brain scan, some brains are simply located quite far away from the ‘control’ brain, whereas some are more like the controls, so the autism wouldn’t be that severe.”

The IoP team scanned the brains of 20 healthy men and 20 men with ASD, aged between 20 and 68 years. The men with ASD had already been diagnosed by traditional methods, which includes IQ tests, a psychiatric interview, physical examinations and a blood test. Once all the brains had been imaged using a standard clinical MRI scanner, the pictures were analysed for differences using a technique called pattern classification, which is widely used in facial recognition technology but has not, until now, been used on brain scans.

So far, Ecker’s team has only looked at men but there are plans to extend the work to women and children. “We think this approach will work even better with kids because the brain abnormalities you see in autism develop over the life span and they’re most prominent during childhood,” she said. “If we can get up to 90% accuracy in adults, we think it’ll be even better in kids.”

Carol Povey, director of the National Autistic Society’s Centre for Autism, said the study gave a valuable insight into the way people with autism process and understand the world around them. “Eventually, the researchers hope that brain scans might also be a useful diagnostic tool. While further testing is still required, any tools which could help identify autism at an earlier stage, have the potential to improve a person’s quality of life by allowing the right support to be put in place as soon as possible.”

She added: “However, diagnosis is only the first step. At the National Autistic Society, we frequently receive calls from people who have struggled to get support, leaving them anxious, frustrated and in some cases depressed or even suicidal. Research that improves our understanding of autism, is therefore part of a wider struggle to enable people with autism to access appropriate support at every stage of their life.”

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

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