When It’s Not About Race Per Se

We can use facts about human evolutionary history to understand the shape of our minds; using it to understand people’s reactions to race is no exception. As I have discussed before, it is unlikely that ancestral human populations ever traveled far enough, consistently enough throughout our history as a species to have encountered members of other races with any regularity. Different races, in other words, were unlikely to be a persistent feature of our evolutionary history. As such, it seems correspondingly unlikely that human minds contain any modules that function to attend to race per se. Yet we do seem to automatically attend to race on a cognitive level (just as we do with sex and age), so what’s going on here? The best hypothesis I’ve seen as of yet is that people aren’t paying attention to race itself as much as they are using it as a proxy for something else that likely was recurrently relevant during our history: group membership and social coalitions (Kurzban, Tooby, & Cosmides, 2001). Indeed, when people are provided with alternate visual cues to group membership – such as different color shirts – the automaticity of race being attended to appears to be diminished, even to the point of being erased entirely at times.

Bright colors; more relevant than race at times

If people attend to race as a byproduct of our interest in social coalitions, then there are implications here for understanding racial biases as well. Specifically, it would seem unlikely for widespread racial biases to exist simply because of superficial differences like skin color or facial features; instead, it seems more likely that racial biases are a product of other considerations, such as the possibility that different groups – racial or otherwise – simply hold different values as social associates to others. For instance, if the best interests of group X are opposed to those group Y, then we might expect those groups to hold negative opinions of each other on the whole, since the success of one appears to handicap the success of the other (for an easy example of this, think about how more monogamous individuals tend to come into conflict with promiscuous ones). Importantly, to the extent that those best interests just so happen to correlate with race, people might mistake a negative bias due to varying social values or best interests for one due to race.

In case that sounds a bit too abstract, here’s an example to make it immediately understandable: imagine an insurance company that is trying to set its premiums only in accordance with risk. If someone lives in an area at a high risk of some negative outcome (like flooding or robbery), it makes sense for the insurance company to set a higher premium for them, as there’s a greater chance they will need to pay out; conversely, those in low-risk areas can pay reduced premiums for the same reason. In general, people have no problem with this idea of discrimination: it is morally acceptable to charge different rates for insurance based on risk factors. However, if that high-risk area just so happens to be one in which a particular racial group lives, then people might mistake a risk-based policy for a race-based one. In fact, in previous research, certain groups (specifically liberal ones) generally say it is unacceptable for insurance companies to require those living in high-risk areas pay higher premiums if they happen to be predominately black (Tetlock et al, 2000).

Returning the main idea at hand, previous research in psychology has tended to associate conservatives – but not liberals – with prejudice. However, there has been something of a confounding factor in that literature (which might be expected, given that academics in psychology are overwhelmingly liberal): specifically, much of that literature on prejudice asks about attitudes towards groups whose values tend to lean more towards the liberal side of the political spectrum, like homosexual, immigrant, and black populations (groups that might tend to support things like affirmative action, which conservative groups would tend to oppose). When that confound is present, then it’s not terribly surprising that conservatives would look more prejudiced, but that prejudice might ultimately have little to do with the target’s race or sexual orientation per se.  More specifically, if animosity between different racial groups is due primarily to a factor like race itself, then you might expect those negative feelings to persist even in the face of compatible values. That is, if a white person happens to not like black people because they are black, then the views of a particular black person shouldn’t be liable to change those racist sentiments too much. However, if those negative attitudes are instead more of a product of a perceived conflict of values, then altering those political or social values should dampen or remove the effects of race altogether. 

Shaving the mustache is probably a good place to start

This idea was tested by Chambers et al (2012) over the course of three studies. The first of these involved 170 Mturk participants who indicated their own ideological position (strongly liberal to strongly conservative, 5-point scale), their impressions of 34 different groups (in terms of whether they’re usually liberal or conservative on the same scale, as well as how much they liked the target group), as well as a few other measures related to the prejudice construct, like system justification and modern racism. As it turns out, both liberals and conservatives tended to agree with one another about how liberal or conservative the target groups tended to be (r = .97), so their ratings were averaged. Importantly, when the target group in question tended to be liberal (such as Feminists or Atheists), liberals tended to have higher favorability ratings of them (M = 3.48) than did conservatives (M = 2.57; d = 1.23); conversely, when the target group was perceived as conservative (such as business people or the elderly), liberals now tended to have lower favorability ratings (M = 2.99) of them than conservatives (M = 3.86; d = 1.22). In short, liberals tended to feel positive about liberals, and conservatives tended to feel positive about conservatives. The more extreme the perceived political differences of the target were, the larger these biases were (r = .84). Further, when group memberships needed to be chosen, the biases were larger than when they were involuntary (e.g., as a group, “feminist”s generated more bias from liberals and conservatives than “women”).

Since that was all correlational, studies 2 and 3 took a more experimental approach. Here, participants were exposed to a target whose race (white/black) and positions (conservatives or liberal) were manipulated on six different issues (welfare, affirmative action, wealth redistribution, abortion, gun control, and the Iraq war).In study 2 this was done on a within-subjects basis with 67 participants, and in study 3 it was done between-subjects with 152 participants. In both cases, however, the results were similar: in general, the results showed that while the target’s attitudes mattered when it came to how much the participants liked them, the target’s race did not. Liberals didn’t like black targets who disagreed any more than conservatives did. The conservatives happened to like the targets who expressed conservative views more, whereas liberals tended to like targets who expressed liberal views more. The participants had also provided scores on measures of system justification, modern racism, and attitudes towards blacks. Even when these factors were controlled for, however, the pattern of results remained: people tended to react favorably towards those who shared views and unfavorably to those who did not. The race of the person with those views seemed besides the point for both liberals and conservatives. Not to hammer the point home too much, but perceiving ideological agreement – not race – was doing the metaphorical lifting here. 

Now perhaps these results would have looked different if the samples in question were comprised of people who held, more or less, extreme and explicit racist views; the type of people would wouldn’t want to live next to someone of a different race. While that’s possible, there are a few points to make about that suggestion: first, it’s becoming increasing difficult to find people who hold such racist or sexist views, despite certain rhetoric to the contrary; that’s the reason researchers ask about “symbolic” or “modern” or “implicit” racism, rather than just racism. Such openly-racist individuals are clearly the exceptions, rather than the rule. This brings me to the second point, which is that, even if biases did look different among the hardcore racists (we don’t know if they do), for more average people, like the kind in these studies, there doesn’t appear to be a widespread problem with race per se; at least not if the current data have any bearing on the matter. Instead, it seems possible that people might be inferring a racial motivation where it doesn’t exist because of correlations with race (just like in our insurance example).

Pictured: unusual people; not everyone you disagree with

For some, the reaction to this finding might be to say that it doesn’t matter. After all, we want to reduce racism, so being incredibly vigilant for it should ensure that we catch it where it exists, rather than miss it or make it seem permissible. Now that likely true enough, but there are other considerations to add into that equation. One of them is that by reducing your type-two errors (failing to see racism where it exists) you increase your type-one errors (seeing racism where there is none). As long as accusations of being a racist are tied to social condemnation (not praise; a fact alone which ought to tell you something), you will be harming people by overperceiving the issue. Moreover, if you perceive racism where it doesn’t exist too often, you will end up with people who don’t take your claims of racism seriously anymore. Another point to make is that if you’re actually serious about addressing a social problem you see, accurately understanding its causes will go a long way. That is to say that time and energy invested in interventions to reduce racism is time not spent trying to address other problems. If you have misdiagnosed the issue you seek to tackle as being grounded in race, then your efforts to address it will be less successful than they otherwise could be, not unlike a doctor prescribing the wrong medication to treat an infection.          

References: Chambers, J., Schlenker, B., & Collisson, B. (2012). Ideology and prejudice: The role of value conflicts. Psychological Science, 24, 140-149.

Kurzban, R., Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (2001). Can race be erased? Coalitional computation and social categorization. PNAS, 98, 15387-15392.

Tetlock, P., Kristel, O., Elson, S., Green, M., & Lerner, J. (2000). The psychology of the unthinkable: Taboo trade-offs, forbidden base rates, and heretical counterfactuals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78 (5), 853-870 DOI: 10.1037//0022-3514.78.5.853

What Might Research Ethics Teach Us About Effect Size?

Imagine for a moment that you’re in charge of overseeing medical research approval for ethical concerns. One day, a researcher approaches you with the following proposal: they are interested in testing whether a food stuff that some portion of the population occasionally consumes for fun is actually quite toxic, like spicy chilies. They think that eating even small doses of this compound will cause mental disturbances in the short term – like paranoia and suicidal thoughts – and might even cause those negative changes permanently in the long term. As such, they intend to test their hypothesis by bringing otherwise-healthy participants into the lab, providing them with a dose of the possibly-toxic compound (either just once or several times over the course of a few days), and then see if they observe any negative effects. What would your verdict on the ethical acceptability of this research be? If I had to guess, I suspect that many people would not allow the research to be conducted because one of the major tenants of research ethics is that harm should not befall your participants, except when absolutely necessary. In fact, I suspect that were you the researcher – rather than the person overseeing the research – you probably wouldn’t even propose the project in the first place because you might have some reservations about possibly poisoning people, either harming them directly and/or those around them indirectly.

“We’re curious if they make you a danger to yourself and others. Try some”

With that in mind, I want to examine a few other research hypotheses I have heard about over the years. The first of these is the idea that exposing men to pornography will cause a number of harmful consequences, such as increasing how appealing rape fantasies were, bolstering the belief that women would enjoy being raped, and decreasing the perceived seriousness of violence against women (as reviewed by Fisher et al, 2013). Presumably, the effect on those beliefs over time is serious as it might lead to real-life behavior on the part of men to rape women or approve of such acts on the parts of others. Other, less-serious harms have also been proposed, such as the possibility that exposure to pornography might have harmful effects on the viewer’s relationship, reducing their commitment, making it more likely that they would do things like cheat or abandon their partner. Now, if a researcher earnestly believed they would find such effects, that the effects would be appreciable in size to the point of being meaningful (i.e., are large enough to be reliably detected by statistical test in relatively small samples), and that their implications could be long-term in nature, could this researcher even ethically test such issues? Would it be ethically acceptable to bring people into the lab, randomly expose them to this kind of (in a manner of speaking) psychologically-toxic material, observe the negative effects, and then just let them go? 

Let’s move onto another hypothesis that I’ve been talking a lot about lately: the effects of violent media on real life aggression. Now I’ve been specifically talking about video game violence, but people have worried about violent themes in the context of TV, movies, comic books, and even music. Specifically, there are many researchers who believe that exposure to media violence will cause people to become more aggressive through making them perceive more hostility in the world, view violence as a more acceptable means of solving problems, or by making violence seem more rewarding. Again, presumably, changing these perceptions is thought to cause the harm of eventual, meaningful increases in real-life violence. Now, if a researcher earnestly believed they would find such effects, that the effects would be appreciable in size to the point of being meaningful, and that their implications could be long-term in nature, could this researcher even ethically test such issues? Would it be ethically acceptable to bring people into the lab, randomly expose them to this kind of (in a manner of speaking) psychologically-toxic material, observe the negative effects, and then just let them go?

Though I didn’t think much of it at first, the criticisms I read about the classic Bobo doll experiment are actually kind of interesting in this regard. In particular, researchers were purposefully exposing young children to models of aggression, the hope being that the children will come to view violence as acceptable and engage in it themselves. The reason I didn’t pay it much mind is that I didn’t view the experiment as causing any kind of meaningful, real-world, or lasting effects on the children’s aggression; I don’t think mere exposure to such behavior will have meaningful impacts. But if one truly believed that it would, I can see why that might cause some degree of ethical concerns. 

Since I’ve been talking about brief exposure, one might also worry about what would happen to researchers were to expose participants to such material – pornographic or violent – for weeks, months, or even years on end. Imagine a study that asked people to smoke for 20 years to test the negative effects in humans; probably not getting that past the IRB. As a worthy aside on that point, though, it’s worth noting that as pornography has become more widely available, rates of sexual offending have gone down (Fisher et al, 2013); as violent video games have become more available, rates of youth violent crime have done down too (Ferguson & Kilburn, 2010). Admittedly, it is possible that such declines would be even steeper if such media wasn’t in the picture, but the effects of this media – if they cause violence at all – are clearly not large enough to reverse those trends.

I would have been violent, but then this art convinced me otherwise

So what are we to make of the fact that these research was proposed, approved, and conducted? There are a few possibility to kick around. The first is that the research was proposed because the researchers themselves don’t give much thought to the ethical concerns, happy enough if it means they get a publication out of it regardless of the consequences, but that wouldn’t explain why it got approved by other bodies like IRBs. It is also possible that the researchers and those who approve it believe it to be harmful, but view the benefits to such research as outstripping the costs, working under the assumption that once the harmful effects are established, further regulation of such products might follow ultimately reducing the prevalence or use of such media (not unlike the warnings and restrictions placed on the sale of cigarettes). Since any declines in availability or censorship of such media have yet to manifest – especially given how access to the internet provides means for circumventing bans on the circulation of information – whatever practical benefits might have arisen from this research are hard to see (again, assuming that things like censorship would yield benefits at all) .

There is another aspect to consider as well: during discussions of this research outside of academia – such as on social media – I have not noted a great deal of outrage expressed by consumers of these findings. Anecdotal as this is, when people discuss such research, they do not appear to raising the concern that the research itself was unethical to conduct because it will doing harm to people’s relationships or women more generally (in the case of pornography), or because it will result in making people more violent and accepting of violence (in the video game studies). Perhaps those concerns exist en mass and I just haven’t seen them yet (always possible), but I see another possibility: people don’t really believe that the participants are being harmed in this case. People generally aren’t afraid that the participants in those experiments will dissolve their relationship or come to think rape is acceptable because they were exposed to pornography, or will get into fights because they played 20 minutes of a video game. In other words, they don’t think those negative effects are particularly large, if they even really believe they exist at all. While this point would be a rather implicit one, the lack of consistent moral outrage expressed over the ethics of this kind of research does speak to the matter of how serious these effects are perceived to be: at least in the short-term, not very. 

What I find very curious about these ideas – pornography causes rape, video games cause violence, and their ilk – is that they all seem to share a certain assumption: that people are effectively acted upon by information, placing human psychology in a distinctive passive role while information takes the active one. Indeed, in many respects, this kind of research strikes me as remarkably similar to the underlying assumptions of the research on stereotype threat: the idea that you can, say, make women worse at math by telling them men tend to do better at it. All of these theories seem to posit a very exploitable human psychology capable of being manipulated by information readily, rather than a psychology which interacts with, evaluates, and transforms the information it receives.

For instance, a psychology capable of distinguishing between reality and fantasy can play a video game without thinking it is being threatened physically, just like it can watch pornography (or, indeed, any videos) without actually believing the people depicted are present in the room with them. Now clearly some part of our psychology does treat pornography as an opportunity to mate (else there would be no sexual arousal generated in response to it), but that part does not necessarily govern other behaviors (generating arousal is biologically cheap; aggressing against someone else is not). The adaptive nature of a behavior depends on context.

Early hypotheses of the visual-arousal link were less successful empirically

As such, expecting something like a depiction to violence to translate consistently into some general perception that violence is acceptable and useful in all sorts of interactions throughout life is inappropriate. Learning that you can beat up someone weaker than you doesn’t mean it’s suddenly advisable to challenge someone stronger than you; relatedly, seeing a depiction of people who are not you (or your future opponent) fighting shouldn’t make it advisable for you to change your behavior either. Whatever the effects of this media, they will ultimately be assessed and manipulated internally by psychological mechanisms and tested against reality, rather than just accepted as useful and universally applied.  

I have seen similar thinking about information manipulating people another time as well: during discussions of memes. Memes are posited to be similar to infectious agents that will reproduce themselves at the expense of their host’s fitness; information that literally hijacks people’s minds for its own reproductive benefits. I haven’t seen much in the way of productive and successful research flowing from that school of thought quite yet – which might be a sign of its effectiveness and accuracy – but maybe I’m just still in the dark there. 

References: Ferguson, C. & Kilburn, J. (2010). Much ado about nothing: The misestimation and overinterpretation of violent video game effects in eastern and western nations: Comment on Anderson et al (2010). Psychological Bulletin, 136, 174-178.

Fisher, W., Kohut, T., Di Gioacchino, L., & Fedoroff , P. (2013). Pornography, sex crime, and paraphilia. Current Psychiatry Reports, 15, 362.