social psychology

Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight put up an image that illustrates the findings of a recent survey by George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication.This inverted pyramid shows the percent of those polled who said they think global warming will hurt each group “a great deal” or “a moderate amount”:

So as we see, the closer the question got to the person answering the survey, the less severe they thought the impacts of global warming were likely to be. Silver says,

These beliefs are not necessarily irrational. Climate change probably will have more impact on the developing world than the developed one, and it almost certainly will have more impact on our children than it does on ourselves.

But if individuals don’t perceive climate change to really have negative consequences for them or their families, they may not support climate change policies if they fear those policies will hurt jobs/business in the short-term, since they may be more likely to see the economic impacts as personally problematic.

UPDATE: An anonymous commenter pointed out that the 538 pyramid is a bit misleading. Brad Johnson at Wonk Room created a more representative one:

Thanks for the tip!

Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight posted this graph showing Americans’ faith in various institutions (from the 2008 General Social Survey):

I just discovered that PBS provides the entire documentary “A Class Divided” online. The video discusses the experiment a teacher conducted in her classroom, in which she divided her 3rd-grade class into groups with blue eyes and brown eyes and told them the blue-eyed groups were “the better people in this room,” later changing the rules and saying that brown-eyed kids are better (she started this experiment the day after Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot). It’s an interesting look at stereotyping and social psychology, particularly how quickly groups will change their behavior if they are told they have a superior or inferior characteristic.

The website also has clips from a class reunion 14 years later where the people who took part in the experiment talk about it, as well as when the teacher was hired to conduct the experiment on Corrections Department employees to teach them about discrimination and stereotyping.

You might also discuss this experiment when you’re looking at ethics of research–would we allow something like this now? How would parents likely react today if they found out their child was told they were in an “inferior” group? My guess is a teacher would face a lot of opposition trying to do this now.

We used to have a post up about Milgram’s famous obedience study, in which he led people to think they were giving other participants electric shocks, including some that were supposedly at a fatal level. It’s often used as an example of unethical research, since some participants suffered mental distress because they thought they had seriously hurt or even killed someone. We took the original post down when the videos we linked to disappeared, but I just found another video of some footage. For some reason it won’t embed, but here’s a link.

UPDATE: The original footage has been taken down, but the BBC did a replication:

Social psychologists have devised a genuis way to measure our implicit biases; that is, they have found a way to tap into those biases that we hold unconsciously and/or know better than to reveal in mixed company.  You can learn all about it and take all kinds of tests to reveal your own biases here.

One thing these investigations have revealed is that many of us internalize biases against the groups we belong to.  So, women can be sexist and people of color can be racist.  Even if people consciously reject these biases, they often sink in anyway and lead to a kind of self-dislike.

Someone sent in a postcard to PostSecret this week that illustrates just this phenomenon:

Breck C. sent in this story in the Wall Street Journal about a study showing a link between geography and personality– that is, that different personality traits are dominant in different regions of the U.S. Personality traits were measured by answers to the Big Five Personality Test, which is widely used in psychology and other fields to determine a person’s dominant personality traits. The story was accompanied by maps showing where five traits (extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness) are dominant. According to the study, many stereotypes, such as the neurotic East Coaster, have a basis in reality.

Here is a screenshot of the map of conscientiousness:

Leaving aside any questions about personality questionnaires, and whether people are very accurate at reporting their own personality traits, what I found interesting here is the explanation of this pattern in the caption above the map (which I’m assuming was written by someone at the WSJ and didn’t come from the study): perhaps the Great Plains region is conscientious because of “pioneer traditions” reinforced by “the daily demands of farming.” On the other hand, it’s “surprising” that people in the Southwest and Southeast would be conscientious.

This is a great example of a non-scientific explanation of data that relies more on stereotypes and assumptions than anything else. Why would pioneer traditions be any stronger in Kansas and Missouri than in Oregon or Montana (or a number of other states) that were also settled by “pioneers” (however you want to define that term)? I’m unclear whether the reference to farming is meant to describe the past or the present, but either way, it’s suspect. Lots of other states (including those surprisingly conscientious states in the Southwest and Southeast and many of the less conscientious states) have farming traditions, as well as important agricultural sectors today (like, say, Iowa and its corn). The vast majority of people in those conscientious states aren’t engaged in agriculture today. And for that matter, why would the “demands of farming” lead to conscientiousness in a way that other types of work wouldn’t? These seems to play on stereotypes of farmers (and rural folk more generally) as hard-working, honest, salt-of-the-earth types, compared to superficial, rude (but hipper) city dwellers.

It’s the type of unsophisticated, stereotypical interpretation of academic studies that I often see in the media, and I think this particular explanation of why these states would be conscientious is just silly.

Thanks for the link, Breck!

Cross posted at Racialicious.

In many places in the midwest the American Indian is very present, but in other places in the U.S., like in California, Disney’s Pocahontas is as close as we get to “Indians.”  The idea that American Indians are gone comes, in part, from the ubiquitous representation of them with feathers, buckskins, and moccasins. These anachronisms are everywhere (see, for example, here, here, here, here, and here).

American Indians are as modern as the rest of us, why are representations of American Indians, as they live today, so unusual?  And what effect might that have on the psyche of American Indian people?

Via PostSecret.

NEW!  One of the commenters at Racialicious pointed us to a cartoon that illustrates how anachronistic images of American Indians may shape our ideas of what they are like:

This Australian commercial for Toyota Corolla (found here) includes a homogenous, racialized out-group.  More after the video:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ckb-wUHj9WU[/youtube]

The term “out-group homogeneity” refers to the way in which members of an in-group tend to overestimate the extent to which members of an out-group are all alike.  I suppose we don’t know what good kitty’s friends look like (do they all look exactly like him?), but we certainly have the presentation of an out-group that is both categorically different from good kitty and homogeneously so.

I would also like to suggest that that out-group is racialized.  They didn’t use just any kind of cat to represent bad kitties, but a dark-colored cat.   (If I know my cats, the bad “guys” in this video are Russian Blues.)