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by yummyfajitas
4163 days ago
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It's a good question, I have no idea why you are being downvoted. Consider a person who's moral principles are based on empathy. Empathy is well known to be racist - we simply don't feel equally bad is a black person gets pricked with a needle than a white person. (Errors like this are why I believe empathy is a terrible basis for morality.) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3108582/ http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... Now consider path dependence. If you first think about a brown person being tortured, you (statistically) are more likely to accept it - you simply feel less empathy for this person. Then when you generalize to the case of a white person, you'll similarly support torture. Conversely, if you first think about a white person being tortured and then generalize to a black person, you'll oppose it. So it doesn't happen that belief in torture falls apart, what happens is the example you think of to start with determines that belief. |
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First study: why in the world didn't they report their findings of how black people felt watching white people get hurt? That's a pretty bad bias.
Second study: are these people just fishing for proof that white people are racist?
> The less privileged the target seemed, the less participants thought s/he would experience pain. In other words, participants associated hardship with physical toughness. Importantly, target race (Black vs. White) was no longer predictive of pain ratings once we controlled for participants’ perceptions of the target’s privilege,
but they just sidestep that part for the conclusion:
> The present work demonstrates that people assume a priori that Blacks feel less pain than do Whites. This finding has important implications for understanding and reducing racial bias. It sheds new light on well-documented racial biases. Consider, for instance, the finding that White Americans condone police brutality against Black men relative to White men
How am I supposed to take these people seriously? Experiment 5 showed that blackness only correlates with a deeper, more predictive factor but they ignore that to go on a socio-political rant about the plight of black Americans. They do everything they can to fit the results into a preconceived narrative. This isn't science, it's social activism masquerading as science. 90% of their "conclusions" was about things that weren't even part of the experiment.
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This isn't bringing us any closer to understanding how and why people are able to do awful things like commit torture, which should be the goal here. Instead we have to put that question aside and ask why such political bias isn't being called out in science.