[otakucode]

I found that study a really strange one as well. They seem to be operating on the tacit assumption that all of the participants are mush-minded simpletons who think "assigning negative terms" in some study somehow had some relevance to anything anywhere in the world. That's absurd. I invite you to find yourself a quiet room and dedicate yourself to writing the most insidious, invective, negative diatribes aimed at me personally that you are capable of manufacturing. You could do it for decades, and absolutely nothing would come of it. Anyone who believes differently is both wrong and probably has some mild form of mental illness which causes them to conflate their own thought processes and imagination with reality.

Asking a person to assign negative terms to photos is as consequential as asking them to whistle or drum their fingers on a desk. It is meaningless and utterly amoral in content. We're not talking about even applying the terms to actual people, but to images. And they're not being monitored or published. There are a million guarantees that what is being done is thoroughly and totally meaningless.

[mockingbirdy]

Don't underestimate the power of subconscious processes, e.g. we like things we already know or even words that contain letters of our name [1]. There exists an incredible amount of these biases.

> There are a million guarantees that what is being done is thoroughly and totally meaningless.

There are a million subtle ways to influence behavior and thinking. It's very likely that the scientists aren't able to properly measure the effects (because it's hard to isolate the control variables), but the resulting knowledge won't be zero. I agree with you that many scientists overestimate their understanding of the underlying mechanisms - IMO it's still too much hand-waving - in reality our knowledge about social psychology is very limited.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere-exposure_effect

[watwut]

It is not about to what it does with person on picture, it is about what it does with person that is writing them. The way it affects their thinking and feelings toward target, how much they are aware it is affecting them, the way it makes them more and more comfortable with insulting person on pic and what they think or feel about that.

The discomfort is partly because you can make yourself like or hate people you don't know personally and trying to come up with bad/good things to say about them is one approach how to do it. You start process insulting them and you can see yourself starting to feel differently and some might feel good about the process and where it leads.

You know how people close themselves into bubbles that says only bad things about some outside group and then become to genuinely hate that outside group? It is the same, but is small scale, temporary limited and easier to detect.

[otakucode]

I can see that, but I don't understand how simply 'attaching a label' could lead to any real earnest sentiment. If I train myself, day in and day out, to tag a photo of children 'racist', is the presumption that I will start to actually think that children generally believe in fundamental qualitative differences between people that break along racial lines? That isn't how my brain works. If someone asks me 'hey, are kids racists?' I don't think 'hmmm... do I FEEL LIKE kids are racists?'... I think 'Hmmm... do I have any evidence or have I come across any resources that suggest children might harbor racist tendencies?' And 'well I attached all those labels' doesn't qualify as evidence of anything except me wasting my time. Words have power, but they're not magical.

It certainly can be frightfully easy to lead people down a path into forming tons of negative associations about some group or topic, and that will result in a trained emotional response pretty reliably..... but it's just an emotional response. It doesn't mean anything, and can't be used to support or detract from anything in terms of what is true.

[mockingbirdy]

> it's just an emotional response. It doesn't mean anything, and can't be used to support or detract from anything in terms of what is true.

Emotional responses are more important for your belief system and vice versa than you seem to realize. "what is true" is based on your belief system. It may not seem visible, but all those small interactions shape our emotions and belief system.

It's like training data for a neural network which has functional components and meta-learning capabilities (this is essentially what a brain is). Saying "this training data doesn't affect my neural network" or "this part (emotions) of my neural network doesn't affect another part (reasoning)" is not correct when training neural networks. Why would you assume that this is any different for your biological neural network? Every interaction shapes your brain, however small it seems.

[watwut]

You will be more likely to assume the children are racist in ambiguous situations. You will be more likely to react negatively to them.

Children will see your negative emotional response to them and will react to it. The negative or positive emotional response on someone determines a lot about your interaction with them and is hard to hide for most people.