#implict bias

[drgaellon]

There was a seismic shift in medical ethics in the 1990s, away from the paternalism of the past and towards a new emphasis on patient autonomy.

There is an information asymmetry in the doctor-patient relationship in most cases. It is our job to educate the patient adequately to allow them to make an informed decision. It is enormously frustrating, as a doctor, to be able to see that a patient just doesn’t get it and is making a decision from bad information, inadequate understanding, or false beliefs. If the patient understands the potential negative outcomes of refusal, that is their prerogative. It’s when they DON’T understand the consequences of their choices that things get dicey.

In New York, when a patient refuses treatment, we are forbidden to treat them, even if they don’t/can’t understand the consequences of their decision, unless (a) we get an order from a judge to treat over objection (hard to get and takes two weeks or more), or (b) the doctor judges that a delay may put the patient’s life or health at permanent risk, or (c) a failure to treat may result in immediate harm to the patient or others (i.e. you can sedate a patient who is swinging at nurses, even without consent).

We should always provide the best care we can within the limits of the boundaries set by the patient. For example, I teach now that we should avoid the concept of the “discharge against medical advice.” We have a “shared decision making” discussion and document that the patient is making a decision to leave based on other priorities (priorities with which we, as the medical team, disagree). This happened with one of my patients recently; we documented that it was explained that oral antibiotics were a distant third-line therapy and very likely to fail, potentially resulting in heart damage, heart failure, and possibly death - and then proceeded to prescribe the oral antibiotics anyway, because it was better than letting the patient leave with nothing at all (which is what we would have done 25 years ago when I was in training).

As to things you don’t want withheld from you - if I, as the doctor, feel that the treatment you are requesting is clinically inappropriate, I cannot provide it. Doing so is unethical, and often constitutes malpractice, even if you’re asking for it. As with the AMA discussion, if you are asking for an alternative treatment to the one I’m offering, even if it’s a less-effective substitute, that’s qualitatively different from asking for a treatment I know to be ineffective, or worse, actively harmful. Ivermectin for COVID comes to mind - if you want that, proven to be useless, to the exclusion of the treatments we know work, I’m not going to give it. The risk of side effects outweighs the (non-existent) benefit.  In my case above, the risk of no-treatment-at-all outweighs the risk of bad outcome from inadequate-but-better-than-nothing treatment (note the difference between inadequate and ineffective in these examples).

Are there biases in how we decide what’s appropriate or not? Of course; doctors are human, too, and humans have biases, overt and covert. We try to teach awareness and avoidance of bias, especially implicit bias, but it’s notoriously hard to retrain, especially when there are systemic/structural biases that reinforce those implicit personal biases.

Medically speaking, informed consent does not just apply to things you want done to you or for you, it also applies to things that you don't want done to you or things you don't want withheld from you.

I don't think a lot of people realize that, and I don't think a lot of medical professionals want to acknowledge that, because it means they would have to reevaluate the ethics of denying treatment to patients. Also they would have to reckon with their patients' agency and right to self-determination. Both of those things really freak some medpros out.

[milf--adjacent]

"I am a very serious person? I can project whatever I want onto you because you said a word that I have implict bias against because of..... *frantically checks notes* because I saw a meme one time that cast people like you as the fuming steam locomotive while people like me were framed as the sleek FDR bullet train."

[caparrucia]

There's an implict bias in the representation in media conversation that a lot of Americans aren't ready to face and therefore makes a good chunk of their contributions to the conversation pretty meaningless.

When you say "media" do you mean "all media in the world" or do you mean "American media"?

Because I just read someone with their whole chest say they've never seen a Mexican character that likes cumbias on TV and I feel violently gaslit.

[anissapierce]

Btw b4 i get shit abt using the tag internalized homophobia ... Yes it is tht

The study wasn't Abt testing masc presenting vs more fem gay men n even if it were the results probably wouldn't skew much bc studies on implicit bias show tht bc of internalizing bigotry it affects both ppl w power n ppl oppressed

Like you think youre above it but go ahead take one of the harvard implict bias tests n humble urself bc theyve got tons of them on different axis of oppression or hell lemme plug a video

The goal of bias of learning abt it n thinking yr above it its learning abt it so you can recognize it in urself n others n take action

Ya hayawen ya hamar ya zghoub d benadem

[lesbiansforboromir]

Whilst I would never want to claim that Dragon Age's writing isn't full of implicit bias, I do think this argument is relying on things that are more interpretation than fact in the text.

I do not think Anders' treatment has been that universally negative. You can have a Hawke come to skyhold and defend his actions for example, and clearly they both continue to have a stable romantic relationship if you romanced him, judging by the dialogue. Like Anders is not a villain in the sense of someone who needs to be stopped, no one is advocating hunting him down nor is he behaving in any morally repugnant way since the chantry explosion.

Varric is really the only voice of hatred, and that brings about my second disagreement, which I kind of feel more passionately about than the first; Varric is absolutely not the moral arbiter of any game, least of all DA2. Varric barely has a concept of morality at all, Varric can get to the end of any playthrough of DA2 and still call Hawke his best friend, even if you choose to do the most heinous things imaginable! Give Fenris into slavery, kill every scared mage you find, let Meredith kill your own sister, it doesn't matter to Varric he still loves you by the end of that game.

Varric's anger with Anders isn't coming from a place of morality, Anders damaged Kirkwall which is one of the few things Varric actually cares about in DA2 and Varric resents him for it. He really only has bitter and callous things to say about him, there's no point where Varric even appears to take a side in the mage war so if Varric is attempting to drive the moral 'point' of the story in any way he's doing an extremely bad job at it. Varric's arc in Inquisition appears to be in fact his attempt to stop being so damn impotent all the time. Plausibly you could interpret his desire to 'redeem' Solas as a consequence of what he failed to stop Anders from doing.

Anders and Solas are worth comparing and I definitely agree that the way the writers are handling their seperate situations does show bias, but I also think some of that comes down to pure situation. We were never given a chance to actually stop Anders from blowing up the chantry, because that was a catalyst the writers needed for the rest of their planned plots moving forward. But Solas is still 'saveable' in the sense that people want to 'pull him back from the brink' before he does the thing that most would deem unforgivable. But since Anders has already done that theoretically unforgivable thing, the atmosphere around him is different.

That doesn't account for it all for sure, and certainly Anders is not on the recieving end of any similar attempt to redeem him, but I could also see Solas being placed in the same position as Anders narratively if he DID get his plan off.

Honestly to me Anders does remain the far more sympathetic character over Solas for all the reasons you have listed, though to be fair I was never all that taken with either of them. But where the morality bias of the real world writers is concerned, I see that more clearly in things like the choice to save the chargers over the Qunari, where you are essentially sacrificing hundreds of people just for a few mercenaries but there is absolutely no consequence for you doing that at all and you are in fact severely punished for NOT doing it. Which feels like a more clear example of the implict idea that these 'strange' and 'othered' Qunari lives are worth far less than the couple people we know.

There's a lot to be said about the weaknesses and strengths of the writing in Dragon Age games, but for me there's nothing that trumps the way the writers' implicit biases shine through in their treatment of various characters. Anders and Solas showcase the very worst of this. Functionally Anders and Solas could (and I would go so far as to say should) operate as foils to one another. Anders is a victim of decades of abuse at the hands of both individuals and a system that demonized him from a very young age. We are given information about his childhood and time spent in the circle that makes it explicitly clear that Circles are an unjust and abusive system that traumatized him so much that he fled multiple times regardless of the fact that he knew the abuse would escalate each time he escaped. In the end, he chooses to chance death and lifelong struggle via conscription because it is his only shot at escaping his current reality. After that, in DA2, it's made clear that Kirkwall's circle is even worse. Karl is made tranquil, the templars are mad with power, and it's heavily implied that the tranquil are utilized as sex slaves and that some templars may even be selecting mages for tranquility based on their desire for them alone. In the light of all of that, Anders makes a very desperate and destructive choice. Regardless of how players feel about his actions, it's not really up for debate that the context surrounding them creates mitigating circumstances and a sympathetic backing. He was attempting to affect positive change for a group of people facing fates that the game makes clear are worse than death. Despite this, the game's writing treats him as an unsympathetic villain whose actions are not only reprehensible, but completely beyond the realm of human understanding. That dynamic at the end of DA2 carries into DAI. Solas, on the other hand, is on a quest to undo his own actions. His initial construction of the Veil and the problems that it caused can be viewed with (some) similarity to Anders circumstances in that Solas was attempting to right a wrong done by someone else, but the key difference is that, unlike Anders, who was a powerless victim attempting to free other powerless victims, Solas was on a revenge quest to avenge the death of his friend and had an incredible amount of power within the system that he existed as a part of.

His actions had horrific consequences that birthed what is essentially an entirely new existence for everyone in Thedas eons before the start of any of the games. He finds the outcome of his own actions intolerable, and seeks to reverse them. He harms friends and allies to do so, and makes it explicitly clear that he does not care who he harms or what the consequences are to Thedas or the people who live there in his quest to bring back the version of the world that he liked better. Functionally, Solas makes an excellent villain. He stands out from Anders (who operates in his narrative as a symbol of the rage and disenfranchisement of the powerless) as a representation of power and ego unchecked and the damage that they can cause.

Unfortunately, the writing of the game treats him as though he is the tragically complex victim of forces outside of his control when he is in fact the over-powered puppeteer. He is very much the master of his own destiny and he intends to be the master of everyone else's destiny as well by ripping apart the fabric of reality. No character in the series better demonstrates the writer's biases than Varric, who, as a narrator for DA2, essentially acts as the moral arbiter telling players how they should and should not feel about events, explaining what is and is not moral. His reactions to Anders stand out in sharp relief against what we see of his reaction to Solas in the Veilguard releases so far.

To be clear, I don't hate Solas as a character. I think as a villain, he works very well. His complete and total disregard for the wellbeing of others paired with his affect of wise and gentle mage are compelling to witness. His motivations are understandable from the selfish and self-centered core of us as people. He's a fantastic reminder of what happens when we decide that we know what's best with no input from others, when we pursue our desires above all else beneath the veneer of wisdom. He's fun, well rounded, and interesting. He is not, however, a tragic and morally justified sadboi victim of circumstance, and I resent that the writers treated him as though he was.

[nolabballgirl]

Do you think Fatou was experiencing racial micro aggression at work, or was Karin being unprofessional with Fatou at times bc Fatou was frequently messing up at work?

hi, Anon! thanks for your question! short answer: yes, i believe fatou was experiencing racial microaggressions at work and karin’s behavior towards her was an example of subconscious/implicit bias.

i have a feeling this fits into how the writers wanted to highlight the different ways the characters experience racism (obviously the ava/mailin story being quite explicit on that; and perhaps planting the seeds with kieu my/her family/the store). with fatou specifically, i see these parallel/intersecting threads:

learning disabilities and the late diagnosis/lack of diagnosis in black/minority kids

subconscious/implicit bias towards black kids in school

subconscious implicit bias towards black people in the workplace

in my work life, i’ve been a part of several diversity and inclusion committees, and a topic that constantly comes up is how to better dismantle subconscious and implicit bias amongst managers and supervisors. and you don’t have to be a right wing supporter to exhibit it. it’s something that even the most well-meaning and otherwise conscientious manager can act upon without realizing what they are doing!

so turning to karin and fatou, to determine whether fatou is experiencing racial bias and microaggressions at work, i look to a tell-tale sign - whether we have disparate treatment of similarly situated employees of different races (fatou and mailin), and between the clips and the text messages, that’s what i see is happening:  

fatou’s employment history - we know that fatou is not a brand new employee at aquarius (compared to mailin), but she’s been working there for a bit. we know fatou is great with animals, and presumably fatou’s mistakes are a relatively recent or seldom occurring phenomenon for her to have held the job thus far.

mailin’s hiring - as soon as mailin is hired, we instantly see karin starting to differentiate between the two, treating mailin as the “star” employee from the get-go. to the viewer, karin has already made the judgment call that mailin will be a better employee than fatou as soon as she is hired. we see the constant positive affirmations directed towards mailin (the white employee) vs. the almost always negative criticism directed towards fatou (the black employee). this happens all the time in hiring - it’s human nature to connect to those who we perceive to be just like us. often times, it manifests as managers supporting and promoting those workers who remind them the most of themselves. and i think that feeds into how karin views mailin.

fatou’s mistakes - i’ve often heard the phrase: “a minority needs to be twice as good to earn half the success as a white worker.” the converse applies to mistakes, where studies have shown that mistakes made by women and minorities are viewed as worse than if a white male committed the same. so yes, fatou has made mistakes, but let’s look at (Ep. 8, Clip 1), where fatou calls out karin as “only noticing her when she makes mistakes” and points out that she only made mistakes a handful of times, but her good qualities are always overlooked. karin also uses coded language (”dreamy”), which we see managers using as euphemisms for racial tropes of lazy, unproductive, etc. i think this hits the nail on the head with respect to implicit bias and minorities, and i’ve seen so many examples of this after annual reviews for employees come out, where minor mistakes often overshadow a lot of positive growth, development, and contributions that minorities make to the workplace.

so yes, my take is even though fatou has made some mistakes in the workplace due to her dyscalculia, i do think karin’s attitude and overall demeanor towards fatou exhibit implicit bias towards her and are examples of racial microaggressions in the workplace.

[angeloncewas]

nd anon! i should clarify what i meant when i compared the dream rap comment to the nd people comment, because i phrased it really wrong, sorry. i mean that, like how when dream said that he wasn't intending to be racist- he has implict/unchecked/whatever racial bias due to being a white man from florida, like how the dream_out people didnt intend to be ableist, they just have this ingrained bias due to growing up in the US. i think you're absolutely right abt the difference i didnt fully think+

Oh, sorry ! Didn't mean to misinterpret.

That's definitely true - we all have these intrinsic biases that go unchecked and often unnoticed entirely (because who's gonna point them out? other, similarly biased people?) and I'm sure if those dream_out people were actual public figures, theirs would be brought to light just as much as they called out his.

[satanbird]

If you have a moment, sit down with me and let's talk about genital preferences. Why? Because it's a subject that is very important to me and I find is highly misunderstood. Cw: discussions relating to genitalia, transantagonism, and violence against trans people/murder of trans people -- People believe that their sexual preferences are based entirely in biological fact; that their born with certain innate preferences for certain traits in people. The truth is that implict bias plays a large role in our attraction and we discriminate in all sorts of ways that we may not even be aware of. Many people find themselves unattracted, or even repulsed, by certain genitalia. This seems like a normal and natural thing but when you take a closer look you'll notice something: it favors cisgender people. Now hear me out; people like to believe that they are largely unproblematic; unstained by society and it's oppressive forces, but this is often not true and can be very counterproductive as it prevents people from analyzing their own biases and how they may be reinforcing certain ideologies that are harmful to oppressed peoples. Genital preferences are interesting in that they almost always line up with societal expectations of genitalia in regards to gender; that is that men have penises and women have vaginas. However, the existence of trans people shows that this idea simply isn't universal. Men can have vaginas, and women can have penises. However when it comes to genital preferences, it's apparent that straight men tend to prefer vaginas, straight women tend to prefer penises, gay men tend to prefer penises, lesbian women tend to prefer vaginas, and bisexual and pan people tend to have no preference at all. This is troubling as it suggests that when someone is attracted to a man, it is expected that he have a penis, and that when someone is attracted to a woman, that she have a vagina. This is problematic because this invalidates the gender identities of trans people by suggesting that if they don't have certain genitalia, they aren't truly the gender they identify as. Things get worse when you realize that these genital preferences not only reinforce stereotypes about what type of bodies men and women should have, but disproportionately result in trans people being rejected and invalidated. By having preferences that match up with societal expectations of gender, you end up with cis people experiencing far less, if any, rejection based on their genitalia, because their bodies are seen as valid while trans people are seen as not. When a trans person is rejected for what type of body they have, it's not just a loss of a potential partner, it results in a loss in dignity. Trans people consistently struggle to find people who love them despite their genitalia, whereas cis people are able to navigate the dating world with little fear of being rejected simply for having the body they were born with. This not only makes dating more difficult for trans people, but it can negatively affect their self esteem and trigger dysphoria which is scientifically proven to be bad for trans people's mental health. Things don't end here either. Genital preferences don't always just result in trans people being rejected; it can and has resulted in violence against trans people. This year alone at least 22 trans people have been murdered in the U.S at the time of posting this status, and this is just those that have been reported. This is frightening and should be taken seriously, and we should seriously consider why this is happening. When societal standards of genitalia are allowed to exist, and go unchecked, it results in unrealistic expectations about the people we are attracted to. The truth is that you have probably been attracted to someone who is transgender and simply didn't know it. Until you've seen someone with their pants down you can never be truly sure about their genitalia, and with this societal expectation comes people who experience a shock when they end up engaging with someone sexually and their genitalia doesn't line up with their expectations. Some people at this point will reject the trans person, resulting in that trans person likely feeling hurt and invalidated, some will cut off all contact, and still others will react violently. This is why genital preferences are problematic, because at it's core it discriminates against trans people, invalidates their identities, and puts them in danger. Genital preferences need to be called out for what they are, the product of a cissexist, transmisogynistic society that enforces stereotypes and expectations that systemically oppress trans people. Now I know what you might be thinking, "I have a genital preference, I'm not transphobic, and I can't control it." The problem with this line of thinking is that it assumes that you exist in a vacuum, that you have navigated soceity without being affected by its values and culture. This is, as nicely as I can put it, a naive sentiment. Society has socialized us to think in many ways that is beyond our conscious awareness. Being raised in a society that is racist, heterosexist, cissexist, misogynistic, ableist, intersexist, etc. is inherently going to result in people with beliefs and ways of thinking that are influenced by these oppressive ideologies. You can't assume that you are safe from prejudice. You must be willing to be self-aware and critical of your own thoughts and actions and how society has influenced them. I'm not saying it's a switch you can turn off and on. It takes time and critical thinking and openmindedness. If you have a genital preference, you can overcome it. I myself have overcome genital preferences of my own. Genital preferences are not like sexual or romantic orientations, which we have no control over, with time and effort you can overcome them, but the first step is to acknowledge why you have them to begin with and understand why it's problematic. The rest will come with time. --   If you read all of this, thank you. Just your time and consideration is an important step in becoming aware of and eventually dismantling transmisogynistic ideologies. Once again, thank you, and I hope you have a wonderful, and thoughtful day.

[sciencenewsforstudents]

Within the last three years, police have killed more than 100 unarmed people in the United States. The victims have been people of different races. Staff at the Washington Post recently reviewed data on police shootings. In 2015, their data show, unarmed black men were seven times as likely to be killed by police as were unarmed white men.

Justin Nix works at the University of Louisville in Kentucky. As a criminologist, he is a social scientist who studies rates and likely causes of crime. In a new study, he and his colleagues warn against comparing shooting numbers, as the Washington Post did, to total population figures. Why? Other U.S. data show a higher rate of blacks involved in crime. So Nix and his team used a statistics tool known as regression analysis. It accounts for other factors that might also have had an impact here. They include such things as rates of arrest, calls for police help and more.

Yet even after accounting for such things, Nix's team found that black civilians killed by U.S. police were more than twice as likely to have been unarmed. "These findings," the study says, "suggest evidence of implict bias" in the real world. Nix and his team just described their findings online, February 8, in Criminology & Public Policy.

Scientists Say: Stereotype

“We all know social stereotypes and racial stereotypes seem to be embedded in our culture,” says Manos Tsakiris. He’s a neuroscientist at Royal Holloway, University of London in England. He was part of a research team that has just investigated the possible role of normal body functions in racist behaviors. The team’s results suggest that the phase of a heartbeat can affect how threatening a behavior appears — if and only if the person being judged had belonged to another race.

Tsakiris’ group published its findings January 17 in Nature Communications.

[elftwink]

i tried to do an implict bias test and got bored half way through

[socialjusticefail]

The last half of this episode is about implict bias tests. The first part of this episode is about a training that the military is wasting money on.

[implicitbiasisracism-blog]

Implict bias allows people to lie about their socially stigmatized hate for and discrimination against Black people by making up excuses that the behavior comes from the unconscious and thus they are not responsible for it. 

[grgedoors02142]

This map shows what white Europeans associate with race – and it makes for uncomfortable reading

 This new map shows how easily white Europeans associate black faces with negative ideas.

Since 2002, hundreds of thousands of people around the world have logged onto a website run by Harvard University called Project Implicit and taken an “implicit association test” (IAT), a rapid-response task which measures how easily you can pair items from different categories.

To create this new map, we used data from a version of the test which presents white or black faces and positive or negative words. The result shows how easily our minds automatically make the link between the categories – what psychologists call an “implicit racial attitude”.

Each country on the map is coloured according to the average score of test takers from that country. Redder countries show higher average bias, bluer countries show lower average bias, as the scale on the top of the map shows.

Like a similar map which had been made for US states, our map shows variation in the extent of racial bias – but all European countries are racially biased when comparing blacks versus whites.

In every country in Europe, people are slower to associate blackness with positive words such as “good” or “nice” and faster to associate blackness with negative concepts such as “bad” or “evil”. But they are quicker to make the link between blackness and negative concepts in the Czech Republic or Lithuania than they are in Slovenia, the UK or Ireland.

No country had an average score below zero, which would reflect positive associations with blackness. In fact, none had an average score that was even close to zero, which would reflect neither positive nor negative racial associations.

A screeshot from the online IAT test. IAT, Project Implict Implicit bias

Overall, we have scores for 288,076 white Europeans, collected between 2002 and 2015, with sample sizes for each country shown on the left-hand side.

Because of the design of the test it is very difficult to deliberately control your score. Many people, including those who sincerely hold non-racist or even anti-racist beliefs, demonstrate positive implicit bias on the test. The exact meaning of implicit attitudes, and the IAT, are controversial, but we believe they reflect the automatic associations we hold in our minds, associations that develop over years of immersion in the social world.

Although we, as individuals, may not hold racist beliefs, the ideas we associate with race may be constructed by a culture which describes people of different ethnicities in consistent ways, and ways which are consistently more or less positive. Looked at like this, the IAT – which at best is a weak measure of individual psychology – may be most useful if individuals’ scores are aggregated to provide a reflection on the collective social world we inhabit.

The results shown in this map give detail to what we already expected – that across Europe racial attitudes are not neutral. Blackness has negative associations for white Europeans, and there are some interesting patterns in how the strength of these negative associations varies across the continent.

North and west Europe, on average, have less strong anti-black associations, although they still have anti-black associations on average. As you move south and east the strength of negative associations tends to increase – but not everywhere. The Balkans look like an exception, compared to surrounding countries. Is this because of some quirk about how people in the Balkans heard about Project Implicit, or because their prejudices aren’t orientated around a white-black axis? For now, we can only speculate.

Open questions

When interpreting the map there are at least two important qualifications to bear in mind.

The first is that the scores only reflect racial attitudes in one dimension: pairing white/black with goodness/badness. Our feelings about ethnicity have many more dimensions which aren’t captured by this measure.

The second is that the data comes from Europeans who visit the the US Project Implicit website, which is in English. We can be certain that the sample reflects a subset of the European population which are more internet-savvy than is typical. They are probably also younger, and more cosmopolitan. These factors are likely to underweight the extent of implicit racism in each country, so that the true levels of implicit racism are probably higher than shown on this map.

This new map is possible because Project Implicit release their data via the Open Science Framework. This site allows scientists to share the raw materials and data from their experiments, allowing anyone to check their working, or re-analyse the data, as we have done here. I believe that open tools and publishing methods like these are necessary to make science better and more reliable.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2qqGSQR

[repwinpril9y0a1]

This map shows what white Europeans associate with race – and it makes for uncomfortable reading

 This new map shows how easily white Europeans associate black faces with negative ideas.

Since 2002, hundreds of thousands of people around the world have logged onto a website run by Harvard University called Project Implicit and taken an “implicit association test” (IAT), a rapid-response task which measures how easily you can pair items from different categories.

To create this new map, we used data from a version of the test which presents white or black faces and positive or negative words. The result shows how easily our minds automatically make the link between the categories – what psychologists call an “implicit racial attitude”.

Each country on the map is coloured according to the average score of test takers from that country. Redder countries show higher average bias, bluer countries show lower average bias, as the scale on the top of the map shows.

Like a similar map which had been made for US states, our map shows variation in the extent of racial bias – but all European countries are racially biased when comparing blacks versus whites.

In every country in Europe, people are slower to associate blackness with positive words such as “good” or “nice” and faster to associate blackness with negative concepts such as “bad” or “evil”. But they are quicker to make the link between blackness and negative concepts in the Czech Republic or Lithuania than they are in Slovenia, the UK or Ireland.

No country had an average score below zero, which would reflect positive associations with blackness. In fact, none had an average score that was even close to zero, which would reflect neither positive nor negative racial associations.

A screeshot from the online IAT test. IAT, Project Implict Implicit bias

Overall, we have scores for 288,076 white Europeans, collected between 2002 and 2015, with sample sizes for each country shown on the left-hand side.

Because of the design of the test it is very difficult to deliberately control your score. Many people, including those who sincerely hold non-racist or even anti-racist beliefs, demonstrate positive implicit bias on the test. The exact meaning of implicit attitudes, and the IAT, are controversial, but we believe they reflect the automatic associations we hold in our minds, associations that develop over years of immersion in the social world.

Although we, as individuals, may not hold racist beliefs, the ideas we associate with race may be constructed by a culture which describes people of different ethnicities in consistent ways, and ways which are consistently more or less positive. Looked at like this, the IAT – which at best is a weak measure of individual psychology – may be most useful if individuals’ scores are aggregated to provide a reflection on the collective social world we inhabit.

The results shown in this map give detail to what we already expected – that across Europe racial attitudes are not neutral. Blackness has negative associations for white Europeans, and there are some interesting patterns in how the strength of these negative associations varies across the continent.

North and west Europe, on average, have less strong anti-black associations, although they still have anti-black associations on average. As you move south and east the strength of negative associations tends to increase – but not everywhere. The Balkans look like an exception, compared to surrounding countries. Is this because of some quirk about how people in the Balkans heard about Project Implicit, or because their prejudices aren’t orientated around a white-black axis? For now, we can only speculate.

Open questions

When interpreting the map there are at least two important qualifications to bear in mind.

The first is that the scores only reflect racial attitudes in one dimension: pairing white/black with goodness/badness. Our feelings about ethnicity have many more dimensions which aren’t captured by this measure.

The second is that the data comes from Europeans who visit the the US Project Implicit website, which is in English. We can be certain that the sample reflects a subset of the European population which are more internet-savvy than is typical. They are probably also younger, and more cosmopolitan. These factors are likely to underweight the extent of implicit racism in each country, so that the true levels of implicit racism are probably higher than shown on this map.

This new map is possible because Project Implicit release their data via the Open Science Framework. This site allows scientists to share the raw materials and data from their experiments, allowing anyone to check their working, or re-analyse the data, as we have done here. I believe that open tools and publishing methods like these are necessary to make science better and more reliable.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2qqGSQR

[exfrenchdorsl4p0a1]

This map shows what white Europeans associate with race – and it makes for uncomfortable reading

 This new map shows how easily white Europeans associate black faces with negative ideas.

Since 2002, hundreds of thousands of people around the world have logged onto a website run by Harvard University called Project Implicit and taken an “implicit association test” (IAT), a rapid-response task which measures how easily you can pair items from different categories.

To create this new map, we used data from a version of the test which presents white or black faces and positive or negative words. The result shows how easily our minds automatically make the link between the categories – what psychologists call an “implicit racial attitude”.

Each country on the map is coloured according to the average score of test takers from that country. Redder countries show higher average bias, bluer countries show lower average bias, as the scale on the top of the map shows.

Like a similar map which had been made for US states, our map shows variation in the extent of racial bias – but all European countries are racially biased when comparing blacks versus whites.

In every country in Europe, people are slower to associate blackness with positive words such as “good” or “nice” and faster to associate blackness with negative concepts such as “bad” or “evil”. But they are quicker to make the link between blackness and negative concepts in the Czech Republic or Lithuania than they are in Slovenia, the UK or Ireland.

No country had an average score below zero, which would reflect positive associations with blackness. In fact, none had an average score that was even close to zero, which would reflect neither positive nor negative racial associations.

A screeshot from the online IAT test. IAT, Project Implict Implicit bias

Overall, we have scores for 288,076 white Europeans, collected between 2002 and 2015, with sample sizes for each country shown on the left-hand side.

Because of the design of the test it is very difficult to deliberately control your score. Many people, including those who sincerely hold non-racist or even anti-racist beliefs, demonstrate positive implicit bias on the test. The exact meaning of implicit attitudes, and the IAT, are controversial, but we believe they reflect the automatic associations we hold in our minds, associations that develop over years of immersion in the social world.

Although we, as individuals, may not hold racist beliefs, the ideas we associate with race may be constructed by a culture which describes people of different ethnicities in consistent ways, and ways which are consistently more or less positive. Looked at like this, the IAT – which at best is a weak measure of individual psychology – may be most useful if individuals’ scores are aggregated to provide a reflection on the collective social world we inhabit.

The results shown in this map give detail to what we already expected – that across Europe racial attitudes are not neutral. Blackness has negative associations for white Europeans, and there are some interesting patterns in how the strength of these negative associations varies across the continent.

North and west Europe, on average, have less strong anti-black associations, although they still have anti-black associations on average. As you move south and east the strength of negative associations tends to increase – but not everywhere. The Balkans look like an exception, compared to surrounding countries. Is this because of some quirk about how people in the Balkans heard about Project Implicit, or because their prejudices aren’t orientated around a white-black axis? For now, we can only speculate.

Open questions

When interpreting the map there are at least two important qualifications to bear in mind.

The first is that the scores only reflect racial attitudes in one dimension: pairing white/black with goodness/badness. Our feelings about ethnicity have many more dimensions which aren’t captured by this measure.

The second is that the data comes from Europeans who visit the the US Project Implicit website, which is in English. We can be certain that the sample reflects a subset of the European population which are more internet-savvy than is typical. They are probably also younger, and more cosmopolitan. These factors are likely to underweight the extent of implicit racism in each country, so that the true levels of implicit racism are probably higher than shown on this map.

This new map is possible because Project Implicit release their data via the Open Science Framework. This site allows scientists to share the raw materials and data from their experiments, allowing anyone to check their working, or re-analyse the data, as we have done here. I believe that open tools and publishing methods like these are necessary to make science better and more reliable.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2qqGSQR

[rtawngs20815]

This map shows what white Europeans associate with race – and it makes for uncomfortable reading

 This new map shows how easily white Europeans associate black faces with negative ideas.

Since 2002, hundreds of thousands of people around the world have logged onto a website run by Harvard University called Project Implicit and taken an “implicit association test” (IAT), a rapid-response task which measures how easily you can pair items from different categories.

To create this new map, we used data from a version of the test which presents white or black faces and positive or negative words. The result shows how easily our minds automatically make the link between the categories – what psychologists call an “implicit racial attitude”.

Each country on the map is coloured according to the average score of test takers from that country. Redder countries show higher average bias, bluer countries show lower average bias, as the scale on the top of the map shows.

Like a similar map which had been made for US states, our map shows variation in the extent of racial bias – but all European countries are racially biased when comparing blacks versus whites.

In every country in Europe, people are slower to associate blackness with positive words such as “good” or “nice” and faster to associate blackness with negative concepts such as “bad” or “evil”. But they are quicker to make the link between blackness and negative concepts in the Czech Republic or Lithuania than they are in Slovenia, the UK or Ireland.

No country had an average score below zero, which would reflect positive associations with blackness. In fact, none had an average score that was even close to zero, which would reflect neither positive nor negative racial associations.

A screeshot from the online IAT test. IAT, Project Implict Implicit bias

Overall, we have scores for 288,076 white Europeans, collected between 2002 and 2015, with sample sizes for each country shown on the left-hand side.

Because of the design of the test it is very difficult to deliberately control your score. Many people, including those who sincerely hold non-racist or even anti-racist beliefs, demonstrate positive implicit bias on the test. The exact meaning of implicit attitudes, and the IAT, are controversial, but we believe they reflect the automatic associations we hold in our minds, associations that develop over years of immersion in the social world.

Although we, as individuals, may not hold racist beliefs, the ideas we associate with race may be constructed by a culture which describes people of different ethnicities in consistent ways, and ways which are consistently more or less positive. Looked at like this, the IAT – which at best is a weak measure of individual psychology – may be most useful if individuals’ scores are aggregated to provide a reflection on the collective social world we inhabit.

The results shown in this map give detail to what we already expected – that across Europe racial attitudes are not neutral. Blackness has negative associations for white Europeans, and there are some interesting patterns in how the strength of these negative associations varies across the continent.

North and west Europe, on average, have less strong anti-black associations, although they still have anti-black associations on average. As you move south and east the strength of negative associations tends to increase – but not everywhere. The Balkans look like an exception, compared to surrounding countries. Is this because of some quirk about how people in the Balkans heard about Project Implicit, or because their prejudices aren’t orientated around a white-black axis? For now, we can only speculate.

Open questions

When interpreting the map there are at least two important qualifications to bear in mind.

The first is that the scores only reflect racial attitudes in one dimension: pairing white/black with goodness/badness. Our feelings about ethnicity have many more dimensions which aren’t captured by this measure.

The second is that the data comes from Europeans who visit the the US Project Implicit website, which is in English. We can be certain that the sample reflects a subset of the European population which are more internet-savvy than is typical. They are probably also younger, and more cosmopolitan. These factors are likely to underweight the extent of implicit racism in each country, so that the true levels of implicit racism are probably higher than shown on this map.

This new map is possible because Project Implicit release their data via the Open Science Framework. This site allows scientists to share the raw materials and data from their experiments, allowing anyone to check their working, or re-analyse the data, as we have done here. I believe that open tools and publishing methods like these are necessary to make science better and more reliable.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2qqGSQR