Category: science

48 “Colour blindness” is a disability

December 1, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · psychology · race · racism

*I am being asked to check my ableist privilege in the comments because of my use of the term ‘disability’ in the title. While I disagree that my intended use of the term is ableist, I am also aware that intent is unimportant. The context in which I am attempting to use the word is to contrast it with the idea that colour blindness is better than colour awareness, and that adopting a posture of being less able to see it is negative because it robs one of the ability to see if when appropriate. My apologies if this use is pejorative. I will avoid using the term without context in the future.

I am reasonably fluent in English, which is lucky since it is the language of the internet. Sometimes, however, I wish I was more fluent in other languages as well. Not simply because I enjoy the phonics of exotic locales, although I definitely do. Not simply because there are some phrases (or bon mots, if you will) that can only be expressed in their native tongue, although that is certainly true. Not simply to appear more classy and well-traveled than I am, although that would be nice. No, the principal reason I wish I spoke more languages was so that I would have enough words to heap my contempt upon the idea of “colour blindness”.

Colour blindness is an arch-liberal invention that seems to be largely built from ignorance and guilt. The supposed ideal behaviour is to behave as though you do not see racial differences between people, so that you will treat everyone equally regardless of their ethnicity. Sounds pretty harmless, right? For those of you unfamiliar with my stance on this particular attitude, the reason colour blindness fails as a useful method of achieving racial harmony is that it tends to blind people (white people principally) to instances of both covert and overt racism. Race has a real impact, and failing to recognize the role it plays in our interactions only serves to mask it behind good intentions rather than exposing it to the scrutiny it requires.

As I discussed this morning, there are types of racism that cannot be solved by simply wishing them away or attributing them to malice from “racists”. Racism should not be treated as merely a personal character flaw of a handful of backward people, but as a topic of conversation for all people to engage in and explore. It’s already happening in some (perhaps) unlikely places: … Continue Reading

0 Movie Friday: Eddie Izzard – Religion, Science and Atheism

November 25, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · funny · movie · religion · science

Comedy is a marvelous thing. It has the unique ability to rob things of their power, particularly when that power is based on fear. By pointing out the bizarre aspects of things that frighten us, they are reduced to the level of mundane and even silly. There is perhaps nobody with a greater talent for finding the absurd in the commonplace than Eddie Izzard:

Sometimes ridicule can be used as a weapon. It can be used to disarm and expose the inconsistencies or irrational elements in an opponent’s argument. Other times, like in the above clip, it can be used simply as a tool to explain, in a way that appears tremendously effective. It’s hard to watch that and come away with any conclusion other than “there’s a lot of really stupid stuff in that religion.” I’d imagine the reaction would be similar even if that religion was yours.

We spend a lot of time learning to speak rationally. Maybe we should work instead on learning to be funny.

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7 Sunlight: the best disinfectant

November 15, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · Canada · law · news · police · science

When I started this blog, I wasn’t anti-police. I saw police as a necessary part of society, with individual officers being basically decent people who react badly when the chips are down, due to over-work and high-stress jobs. My view of individual officers hasn’t changed much, but as I learn more I have begun to see that there is much more to the picture.

The beautiful thing about science is the peer review process. I am not simply referring to the formal process that happens when you submit a manuscript for publication, but the climate of collegial over-shoulder-reading that is de rigeur for the discipline. Scientists do not research in a vacuum – we present our findings at conferences, we discuss them at professional meetings, and of course there are publications. In so doing, not only do we ensure that we learn from each other, but we stand a much better chance of catching each other’s mistakes.

Not so for police – the attitude from various police departments is one of insularity, croneyism and unflagging loyalty, regardless offense. This attitude is perhaps on no better display than in the following tragic story: … Continue Reading

6 Crommunist joins a cult (part II)

November 14, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · crommunism · psychology · skepticism

In which our hero continues his narration of attending a workshop for a self-help program. Read Part 1.

What if everything you ever wanted… came in a ROCKET CAN? Okay, so this presentation wasn’t quite as entertaining as Powerthirst, but it amused me for the span of an evening. When we left off, the audience had just broken off into smaller groups to chat with the coaches.

What would you give?

The group discussion came back to the same central question that Mr. Vicente had kept posing, broken down into three (extremely leading) subquestions: 1) what would you like to achieve, 2) what would that accomplish for you, and 3) how much would you give up to achieve it? I call these leading questions because they prime you to accept that there is something on offer than can accomplish the transition from 1 to 2, in exchange for 3. … Continue Reading

46 Oh, and there’s also this

November 10, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · feminism · psychology · science

I’m so forgetful. Sometimes I get so enamored of my own writing that important things slip my mind. The pragmatic argument is not the only reason I’m a feminist. There’s also the empirical one:

The SAT I is designed solely to predict students’ first year college grades. Yet, despite the fact that females earn higher grades throughout both high school and college, they consistently receive lower scores on the exam than do their male counterparts. In 2001, females averaged 35 points lower than males on the Math section of the test, and 3 points lower on the Verbal section. A gender gap favoring males persists across all other demographic characteristics, including family income, parental education, grade point average, course work, rank in class, size of high school, size of city, etc.

There are a number of pieces of evidence that suggest a systemic bias against women. I am familiar with dissecting these biases because they show up in the same kinds of places we find biases against black people. The pernicious thing about these kinds of non-obvious forms of sexism is that they have immense staying power. As the test causes women to underachieve, it means that fewer women are accepted into elite mathematics programs, which means fewer elite-level female mathematicians are produced, which means that math remains a “man’s field” for the next generation of students.

But it doesn’t simply stop at the SAT: … Continue Reading

22 When in doubt, demonize!

November 8, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · Canada · crime · law · news · politics · science

Let’s play a fun imagination game. Imagine for a moment that you’re the political leader of your country. You’ve just won, with a minority of the votes, a majority of the power. It’s a majority that you’ve been fighting for tooth and nail for nearly a decade of consistent disappointments. You’ve had to compromise with a political system and a populace that disagrees with everything you believe in, but now you’ve finally got the ability to push your pet projects through.

Let’s continue the game, and imagine that you’ve managed to win this majority by playing groups against each other, and ramping up personal attacks against your opponents. It’s paid dividends thus far, because your opponents have been feckless wimps who don’t have the wherewithal to punch back. What happens when, in the absence of a credible politician to oppose you, you’re instead opposed by reality. What do you do?

If your answer is “launch personal attacks against reality”, then congratulations! You have the right kind of political instincts it takes to be Prime Minister of Canada: … Continue Reading

7 Why are you hitting yourself? Part 8: extra credit questions

November 7, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · critical thinking · crommunism · psychology · science

This is part 8 of an ongoing discussion of a paper by Jost, Banaji and Nosek discussing System Justification Theory. Read Part 1. Read Part 2. Read Part 3. Read Part 4. Read Part 5. Read Part 6. Read Part 7.

Having summed up my lengthy exploration of System Justification Theory, I teased you this morning with the question that you’ve likely been asking youself from the beginning: now that we know about system justification, what can we do to correct for it? Are we doomed to keep making the same mistakes, or can we overcome our terrible mammal brains and become better critical thinkers?

In order to answer this question, I must first re-iterate a point that I’ve been making for almost as long as this blog has been in existence: we can overcome cognitive biases by becoming more aware of them. Just like we, as skeptics, have learned to recognize faulty arguments like straw men and fallacies like appeal to authority, we can also learn to recognize when we (or others) base their arguments on streotypes instead of evidence. System justification lives on stereotype – confronting those will go a long way on its own to reduce the amount of system justifying we do.

There is also something important to be learned from Part 6, which is that system justification is directly connected to the level of inequality present in a society. As we reduce gaps between groups – be they through legislative policies like pay equity or through changing the social stigma associated with being in the minority – we reduce our tendency to ‘explain away’ disparities as being part of the natural order of things. By engineering societies that are more fundamentally equal, we simultaneously rob fuel from the system justifying machine.

Finally, and perhaps most crucially (or just my preferred method), we can reduce system justification by talking about it. The more people are aware that they have a tendency to do this kind of backfilling, the more likely they are to notice themselves doing it in the future. Successes in my own ongoing struggle to become less misogynistic suggests to me that awareness (and acceptance) of the fact that we all have cognitive demons operating below the level of conscious awareness will help us police our own attitudes better. We may never become perfect at it, but we can certainly become better.

Now, I would be a really crummy scientist if I didn’t use this opportunity to raise some research questions of my own that this paper did not address. … Continue Reading

3 Why are you hitting yourself? Part 7: Summary

November 7, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · conservativism · critical thinking · privilege · psychology · science

This is part 7 of an ongoing discussion of a paper by Jost, Banaji and Nosek discussing System Justification Theory. Read Part 1. Read Part 2. Read Part 3. Read Part 4. Read Part 5. Read Part 6.

So on Thursday I finished up with the last sections of the paper, but I didn’t get to do the wrap-up post that I wanted to (time crunch – abstract submission deadline followed by dinner immediately after work, with friend who then asked for a full explanation of the entire OWS movement… it was a long day for my brain). So I’m going to take this opportunity to bring this series to a conclusion.

Why System Justification Theory?

Older psychological models to explain human behaviour focussed on the relationship between individual ego motivation, and group allegiance. The central understanding was that people would tend to demonstrate in-group favouritism and out-group hostility. In the same way we tend not to see ourselves as bad people but vilify the actions of others, we would do the same for groups with whom we did and did not feel allegiance.

The problem with this theory is that it fails to explain a common and seemingly-inexplicable finding: that people often tend to demonstrate an asymmetric bias toward people in high-status groups, even to the point of abhorring their own group. If it was a rare occurrence, we could just chalk it up to “well some folks is crazy”, but when it’s consistently observed in many different populations under experimental conditions, it becomes something that needs looking at. … Continue Reading

4 Why are you hitting yourself? Part 6: SJT writ large

November 3, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · critical thinking · gender · privilege · psychology · race · religion · science · skepticism

This is part 5 of an ongoing discussion of a paper by Jost, Banaji and Nosek discussing System Justification Theory. Read Part 1. Read Part 2. Read Part 3. Read Part 4. Read Part 5.

We left off exploring the consequences of conflicts between how we see ourselves in context of a group, and of how we see the society we live in. There is, the authors suggest (and demonstrate as described in the previous 5 installments of this series), a strong drive within us to reconcile our self of self-worth, in-group approval, and societal outlook. It has the somewhat idiosyncratic effect of causing us to harbour ideas that may work directly to our detriment, but allow us to align these three desires (through the use of stereotyped thinking). Aside from resulting in the advantaged staying at the top, it also leaves those at the bottom with increased psychological issues.

Up until now, our exploration of the specific hypotheses stemming from System Justification Theory has been focussed on individual-level attitudes and effects. In the final section of the paper, the authors explore some of the larger themes that are explained, at least in part, by the desire to approve of the status quo. Most skeptics will be familiar with the concept of cognitive dissonance – it refers generally to a brain state in which we are trying to reconcile two contradictory beliefs. Believers in a deity have pioneered a wide variety of methods to resolve cognitive dissonance – the most popular is the notion of “faith”: recognizing that something is logically impossible but believing it anyway. Throughout this whole discussion, but particularly in the previous installment, we see cognitive dissonance being a key component of the wacky outcomes of SJT. … Continue Reading

5 Why are you hitting yourself? Part 5: this post is entitled

November 3, 2011
by Crommunist
· blog · critical thinking · health · privilege · psychology · science

This is part 5 of an ongoing discussion of a paper by Jost, Banaji and Nosek discussing System Justification Theory. Read Part 1. Read Part 2. Read Part 3. Read Part 4.

We left off last week discussing the relationship between where one stands in the power dynamic, and how we see those at the top. If we are part of the high-status group, we have an implicit bias toward ourselves, where as those in the low-status group have an out-group – which also favours those at the top. When pressure is high to justify the status quo, we reach for stereotypes and facile explanations to rationalize why things are the way they are. Interestingly, insofar as this effect (called system justification) is identical to political conservativism, we see these biases exacerbated in people who confess to being conservative.

One of the advantages of having the kind of education I did (broad-based – a hard science candy shell with a delicious nougaty humanities core) is that I can draw on a variety of analogies when trying to impart unfamiliar concepts. Most of you have taken at least some science courses, so you will perhaps be familiar with Boyle’s Law which states, among other things, that gas will expand to fill its container. It’s that concept I want percolating in the back of your mind as we charge forward through our exploration of System Justification Theory. … Continue Reading

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