On June 3, 2017, late at night, an unnamed 58-year-old homeless man was shoved onto the tracks in a Manhattan subway station. Gray Davis, a 31-year-old ballet dancer, leapt down onto the tracks and lifted the unconscious man to safety. And then lifted himself up before the next train arrived (Cooper & Southall, 2017). Thanks to research on the bystander effect, we know the conditions under which we are less likely to help and under which we are more likely to help (Myers, 2015). Let’s see how these play out with Gray Davis on that night. We are more likely to help when: We are feeling good. He was with his wife and mother after having watched his wife, also a ballet dancer, perform. While they certainly could have been arguing for the last 6 hours, I’m going to choose to believe they had an enjoyable day. We are not in a rush. Their evening out had just come to a close, and they were making their way home. The victim needs help. An unconscious man on train tracks clearly needs help. We know that there were a number of bystanders present. Davis reports that “People were screaming to get help,” and, well, it’s a Saturday night in Manhattan so there must have been others present. Why did the number of bystanders seem to have little impact on Davis? At the time of the incident, Davis was already committed to helping. When his wife, Cassandra Trenary, saw the man and a woman arguing, she sent Davis to get help. He ran up to the token booth, but it was unoccupied. He had returned to the platform to learn that the man had been shoved onto the tracks. And, as a dancer, Gray Davis also knew he had the physical skill to help. Factors that were not present? The victim did not appear to be similar to his rescuer and the incident did not take place in a small town. Other factors that could have been present that we don’t know about? We don’t know if Davis was feeling guilty about something, if he is a religious man, or if he had recently seen someone else being helpful. I have an assignment where I ask students to take the conditions that are more likely to lead to helping and create a scenario in which someone is more likely to help. And then I ask students to reverse them to create a scenario in which someone is less likely to help. If you decide to offer a similar writing assignment, ask students to identify how each condition related to helping behavior is illustrated in their scenario. It will make scoring them much easier.  References Cooper, M., & Southall, A. (2017, June 04). Ballet dancer leaps onto subway tracks and lifts man to safety. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/04/arts/dance/ballet-dancer-gray-davis-subway-rescue.html Myers, D. G. (2015). Exploring social psychology (7th ed.). Boston: McGraw-Hill. ... View more

“American and United are rolling out a stripped-down new [fare] class called Basic Economy” (Schwartz, 2017). And it’s providing foot-in-the-door examples for psychology instructors who are ready to talk about something other than safe-driving signs (Freedman & Fraser, 1966).   With American Airlines’ Basic Economy ticket class, I’m not allowed to use the overhead bins, I can’t choose a seat until I check-in (guaranteeing I’ll be in middle-seat-landia and probably not sitting with my travel companions), I have no possibility of a free upgrade, I can’t change my flight, and I board in the last group (big deal; I can’t put a bag in the overhead bin anyway). “’That’s the experience on a ultra-low-cost carrier,’ said Rajeev Lalwani, an airline industry analyst with Morgan Stanley. As the legacy airlines introduce similar no-frills offerings to hold off upstarts like Spirit, he said, ‘part of the idea is to get folks to upgrade to premium economy and collect fees’” (Schwartz, 2017). That’s the foot-in-the-door: get customers to commit to the lower fare first, and then dangle the next highest fare as a better alternative.   I went to the American Airlines website to see how this played out in real time. I chose a Dallas to Tampa roundtrip scheduled for three weeks from now. American gave me my ticket class options. Clicking on the “Basic Economy” link generated a helpful pop-up. I love the red Xs on the blah-grey background. I don’t think American really wants me to choose this fare.   Once I select the $317 “basic economy” fare – and getting pretty close to being mentally committed to flying American for this trip – I get another helpful pop-up. I can keep my red-fonted “Lowest fare.” Or For just an extra $20, I can have the green-fonted “Good value with benefits” fare and all of these green-checkmarked perks! I need to either “accept restrictions” for that lowest fare (and be treated like a teenager on “restriction”?) or “move to main cabin” (where I can be treated like an adult?). After I “Accept restrictions,” it’s still not too late for me to move to the main cabin! I can keep my red Xs or I can upgrade to bullet points. It’s just another $20… I might not have been willing to pay $337 to fly roundtrip Dallas to Tampa, but once I’ve said okay to that $317 foot in the door, it’s not that hard to say okay to an extra $20. The “ultra-low-cost” carriers have structured their fees to take advantage of foot-in-the-door, too. Where do you think American and United got the idea? That same trip from Dallas to Tampa would cost $177.18 on Spirit Airlines. That means no overhead bin use, no seat assignment until I get to the airport, and Spirit puts me in whatever seat they’d like, and I can’t print a boarding pass at the airport without paying a fee – pretty much the same deal I got with red-X Basic Economy fare on American, minus the boarding pass print fee. After my next click toward purchasing a ticket, Spirit, in a pop-up, says it is willing to give me all of those perks for $152. If I accept it, my total cost for this trip is now $329.18. For those who have not been paying attention, that’s just $7.22 less than American’s “good value with benefits” fare. If I don’t accept it, I can still go “à la carte” on the fees. I have already decided to buy the ticket. I’m ready to purchase it. All I have to do is click the huge red “ADD TO CART” button to get all of those things that make air travel a little more humane. Or I can click the small print link and choose my options later. Once I’ve mentally committed to purchasing a ticket and the airline has their foot in my door, the door is cracked to let in the for-a-fee add-ons. And as a psychologist there isn’t much I can do but say, “I see what you did there.”    References Freedman, J. L., & Fraser, S. C. (1966). Compliance without pressure: The foot-in-the-door technique. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 4(2), 195-202. doi:10.1037/h0023552 Schwartz, N. D. (2017, May 28). Route to air travel discomfort starts on Wall Street. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/28/business/corporate-profit-margins-airlines.html ... View more

In Psychology, 11 th Edition, Nathan DeWall and I report that “In everyday behavior, men tend to act as powerful people often do: talking assertively, interrupting, initiating touches, and staring.” Women tend to be less interruptive, more sensitive, and to speak with more qualifications and hedges.   Have you noticed this phenomenon in conversation or meetings?   A fresh example of men’s more intrusive speech comes from Tonja Jacobi and Dylan Schweers’ forthcoming analysis of U.S. Supreme Court interruptions by (and of) male and female justices. Their finding: “Women [were] interrupted at disproportionate rates by their male colleagues.”   Setting aside the contentious relationship between the late Antonin Scalia and Stephen Breyer, the three most interrupted justices were the court’s three women justices. But these are all progressive judges, so was this instead an ideology difference, with conservative (mostly male) justices interrupting liberal (mostly female) justices? Apparently not. Looking farther back, the moderate conservative Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was interrupted 2.8 times as frequently as her average male colleague.   “I don’t think that a lot of men notice that they’re doing this,” observed Jacobi. ... View more

For those gearing up to teach the social psych chapter in Intro, the news is rife with examples. You could talk about the Rattlers and the Eagles at Robber’s Cave State Park in 1954. Or you could talk about Muslims, Jews, and Christians in 2017. “Almost every day in New York last week there was an interfaith conference or prayer service – involving Christian groups as well as Muslims and Jews – devoted to the current crisis over predominantly Muslim immigrants and refugees” (Demick, 2017). It seems that U.S. president Donald Trump’s immigration policies have created a superordinate goal. There also appears to be a shift in ingroup boundaries. Historically, there has been tension between “my” religious group and “your” religious group. But now the ingroup seems to defined as “refugees” – both past and present. “Formed in 1881 to resettle Jews fleeing pogroms in Europe, [the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society] has in recent years devoted itself to helping non-Jewish refugees. In the last year, it helped resettle more than 4,000 in the United States, about half of them Muslim. [Rabbi Jennie] Rosenn said that 270 synagogues and thousands of congregants nationwide have volunteered their time to find housing and furniture for refugees, to teach them English and enroll their children in school” (Demick, 2017). For those who were Holocaust refugees and their families, the rhetoric and the political action strikes too close to home. The message is simple: We were refugees and you are a refugee; we will take care of you. Amazon has proposed their own ingroup reframing in this commercial where two religious leaders – and friends – discover they have the same problem. Video Link : 1936   References Demick, B. (2017, February 5). How Trump's policies and rhetoric are forging alliances between U.S. Jews and Muslims. Retrieved from http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-jew-muslim-2017-story.html ... View more

Ready to add a current and relevant example of group polarization to your social psych lecture? At NITOP I had a lobby conversation where Victoria Cross was showing Jane Halonen and myself an online course she had created to help students get up to speed before taking a stats class. In one of her modules, she has a wonderful Pew Research Center animated gif showing the polarization of American politics between 1994 and 2014 (Suh, 2014). After discussing group polarization, show students the animated gif on this page (click on the "Animate data" button). National surveys show that over a 20-year span, Americans have become more polarized in their political beliefs (as have members of Congress).  Here is a still shot from 1994 showing the difference between people who identified as Democrat and people who identified as Republican. Not only are the medians close, but there is a lot of overlap in the political leanings of the members of the parties. In this still shot from 2014, you can see that the Democrats have moved more to the left and the Republicans have moved more to the right, and the overlap between the parties has shrunk. In Congress, the division is even greater. "[T]here is now no overlap between the two parties; in the last full session of Congress (the 112th Congress, which ran from 2011-12), every Republican senator and representative was more conservative than the most conservative Democrat (or, putting it another way, every Democrat was more liberal than the most liberal Republican) (Suh, 2014). Invite students to take a couple minutes to think about what they just learned about group polarization. How might the factors that are known to contribute to group polarization apply in this example. Give students an opportunity to share with one or two students near them. After discussion dies down, ask a couple volunteers to share their explanations. Next, ask students to consider ways to counter this group polarization. What can we do as individuals to reverse this political group polarization? After small group discussion, ask volunteers to share their suggestions.   References Suh, M. (2014, June 12). Section 1: Growing Ideological Consistency. Retrieved from http://www.people-press.org/2014/06/12/section-1-growing-ideological-consistency/  ... View more

After covering experiments or as a research methods boost when covering attractiveness, pose this hypothesis to your students: Tattoos on men influence how others perceive the men’s health and attractiveness. Ask students to design an experiment to test this hypothesis, identifying the independent variable (including experimental and control conditions) and the dependent variables. In the design of the experiment, how would students eliminate any potential confounding variables? Circulate among groups as students work through the design. As discussion dies down, ask volunteers to share their experimental designs. Now share with students the experiment conducted by Andrzej Galbarczyk and Anna Ziomkiewicz (2017) using over 2,500 Polish participants recruited through Facebook; all participants self-identified as heterosexual. Researchers used nine non-tattooed male models, photographed from the waist up and without shirts for the control condition. “A professional photographer digitally modified the pictures by adding a black arm tattoo with an abstract, neutral design” for the experimental condition. This means that the only difference in the conditions was the tattoo. Participants were randomly assigned to see one photo for each model pair, and in the nine photos seen, each participant saw at least one tattooed model and one non-tattooed model. The dependent variables were ratings of attractiveness, health, dominance, aggression, fitness as a partner, and fitness as a father. Data were analyzed separately for male and female research participants. Before revealing the results, ask students to predict how the participants responded. Using clickers or a show of hands, ask students: Who did women rate as healthier? Tattooed men Non-tattooed men No difference [Women rated the tattooed men as healthier] Who did men rate as healthier? Tattooed men Non-tattooed men No difference [Men didn’t see a health difference between tattooed and non-tattooed men.] Who did women rate as more attractive? Tattooed men Non-tattooed men No difference [Women didn’t see a difference in attractiveness between tattooed and non-tattooed men.] Who did men rate as more attractive? Tattooed men Non-tattooed men No difference [Men rated the tattooed men as more attractive.] Who did men and women rate as more masculine, dominant, and aggressive? Tattooed men Non-tattooed men No difference [Tattooed men.] Who did women rate “as worse potential partners and parents”? Tattooed men Non-tattooed men No difference [Tattooed men.] Who did men rate “as worse potential partners and parents”? Tattooed men Non-tattooed men No difference [No difference.] Ask students to volunteer guesses as to why women would see tattooed men as healthier than non-tattooed men. And why men would see tattooed men as more attractive than non-tattooed men. The article’s authors offer a number of possible explanations, all worthy of further research.    REFERENCE Galbarczyk, A., & Ziomkiewicz, A. (2017). Tattooed men: Healthy bad boys and good-looking competitors. Personality and Individual Differences, 106, 122-125. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2016.10.051 ... View more

Today’s America is more polarized than in any recent decade. A record 77 percent perceive the nation as divided, reports Gallup. For the first time in Pew survey history, most Republicans and Democrats report having “very unfavorable” views of the other party. A powerful principle helps explain today’s deep divisions: The beliefs and attitudes we bring to a group grow stronger as we discuss them with like-minded others. This process, known to social psychologists as group polarization, can work for good. Peacemakers, cancer patients, and disability advocates gain strength from kindred spirits. In one of my own studies, low-prejudice students became even more accepting while discussing racial issues. But group polarization can also be toxic, as we observed when high-prejudice students became more prejudiced after discussion with one another. The repeated finding from experiments on group interaction: Opinion-diversity moderates views; like minds polarize further. Group polarization feeds extremism. Analyses of terrorist organizations reveal that the terrorist mentality usually emerges slowly, among people who share a grievance. As they interact in isolation (sometimes with other “brothers” and “sisters” in camps or in prisons), their views grow more extreme. Increasingly, they categorize the world as “us” against “them.” Separation + conversation = polarization. The Internet offers us a connected global world without walls, yet also provides a fertile medium for group polarization. Progressives friend progressives and share links to sites that affirm their shared views and that disparage those they despise. Conservatives connect with conservatives and likewise share conservative perspectives. As Steve Martin tweeted, “Dear Satan, thank you for having my Internet news feeds tailored especially for ME!” So, we feed one another information—and misinformation—and then share content we agree with. News, and fake news, spreads. Within the Internet’s echo chamber of the like-minded, viewpoints become more extreme. Suspicion becomes conviction. Disagreements with the other tribe escalate to demonization. The first step toward depolarization is to realize the seductive power of group polarization, and even our own part in it. We need to step outside our comfort zone to hear and understand the other. ... View more

The cover story for the (freely available) December 2016 APA Monitor is on racial bias and police work. The author of the article provides a nice summary of the research to date and how police departments are moving forward to reduce inequalities in their work. In preparation for class discussion (small groups in class or online discussion boards) or as a stand-alone assignment, ask students to read the article and respond to the following questions: Before we can address a problem, we need to know that a problem exists. What evidence is there that police officers show bias against blacks? Explain the difference between explicit prejudice and implicit bias. What is the “the police officer’s dilemma,” and how is it used to test for implicit bias? How do police officers do on this test as compared to civilians? Many police departments have brought in experts to run implicit bias workshops. Are these workshops effective at reducing implicit bias? What alternatives have been proposed for reducing the effects of implicit bias rather than implicit bias itself? Bonus question: What is your local police department doing to reduce the inequalities in how officers treat different members of your community? What can you do, as a citizen of your community, to encourage your police department to make changes that will move police work to be good for everyone in your community? ... View more

A political science grad student, Kevin Munger (2016a, b), decided to conduct an experiment on Twitter. His goal was to reduce the amount of hate speech posted to that media platform. To that end, he searched Twitter for a particular racial slur and sent every writer of such a tweet the same message: “@[subject] Hey man, just remember that there are real people who are hurt when you harass them with that kind of language.” But that’s not all. Munger reasoned that the impact of the message on future use of racial slurs likely depends on the communicator of that message, such as the perceived race and status of the person who is sending the reminder of the impact of language. Munger created four Twitter accounts: “High Follower/White; Low Follower/White; High Follower/Black; and Low Follower/Black.” The high followers had over 500 followers whereas the low followers had two followers. The White accounts displayed a White avatar and had a more stereotypically White-sounding name, Greg. The Black accounts displayed a Black avatar and had a more stereotypically Black-sounding name, Rasheed. Following Munger’s be-nice tweet, Munger tracked daily use of the racial slur over the next two months. The results. When Munger’s twitter account was High Follower/White, the number of racial slurs dropped .3 per day, the highest of any group. High status ingroup members do have power to influence. With about an equal, but smaller, decrease in daily use of racial slurs where the High Follower/Black and Low Follower/White avatars, although these differences disappeared within a few weeks (Munger, 2016b). Ingroup membership and high status both have an immediate, but not lasting impact, all on their own. What about Low Follower/Black? No Impact. In Intro Psych, you can give your students a little practice with experimental design by using this article at the beginning of the course when you cover research methods or as a research methods refresher later in the course when you cover social psychology. Ask students to identify the independent variables and dependent variable. The response to Munger’s missive wasn’t uniform; reponses differered by the anonymity of the Twitter user who received Munger’s message. Munger looked at the profiles of the Twitter users in his experiment. Of those users who were not anonymous, Munger reports that the High Follower/White Twitter account had no impact on the ensuing use of racial slurs. But the Low Follower/Black Twitter account “actually caused an increase (emphasis in original) in the use of racist slurs.” These were largely directed at Munger’s Twitter account that sent the be-nice message. Shout out to Danae Hudson (Missouri State University) for finding this article and suggesting this activity!   References Munger, K. (2016a, November 17). This researcher programmed bots to fight racism on Twitter. It worked. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/11/17/this-researcher-programmed-bots-to-fight-racism-on-twitter-it-worked Munger, K. (2016b). Tweetment effects on the tweeted: Experimentally reducing racist harassment. Political Behavior. doi:10.1007/s11109-016-9373-5 ... View more

Originally posted on October 28, 2016.  It's a hard scene to imagine: immigrant-despising Donald Trump supporters greeting women’s rights-supporting Hillary Clinton supporters with high fives. But it’s happening, virtually over Facebook and in Chicago, as folks from opposite political poles discover their common ground—rooting for their beloved Cubs. As social psychologist Jon Mueller—producer of great social psychology teaching resources—explains in this sports essay, shared threats and superordinate goals can turn enemies into friends. The shelf life for their new ingroup identity as mutual Cubs fans may be short. But for this weekend, at least, the closed fists of political animosities have become the open arms of a shared identity. Go Cubs go! ... View more

Originally posted on October 13, 2016. Amid the uproar over leaked audio of Donald Trump’s boasting about his sexual predation, there was a secondary story—the complicity of interviewer Billy Bush, who appears to snicker approvingly at Trump’s reprehensible comments. “Obviously I’m embarrassed and ashamed,” Bush tweeted after his enabling behavior was revealed. Surely, we can each reassure ourselves: Had we been in a small group situation in which someone injected blatant sexist or racist remarks, we would not play along. But do we underestimate the power of the situation, especially if we have motives to impress a famous or powerful person? Social psychologists Janet Swim and Laurie Hyers put this question to an experimental test. They asked Pennsylvania State University women students to imagine themselves in a small group deciding whom to select for survival on a desert island. If one of the others injected three sexist comments, such as “I think we need more women on the island to keep the men satisfied” or to do the cooking, how would they react? Only 5 percent predicted they would ignore the comments. But when the women actually experienced this very situation, 55 percent said nothing. Other researchers have found people similarly docile—despite predictions of being courageous—when hearing someone utter a racial slur. As Billy Bush now understands, it’s so easy to become complicit—to “get along by going along.” As Marian Wright Edelman observed in The Measure of Our Success (1992), “Have you ever noticed how one example—good or bad—can prompt others to follow? How one illegally parked car can give permission for others to do likewise? How one racial joke can fuel another?” If we attribute Billy Bush’s behavior only to a Trump-like sexist disposition then we can distance ourselves from it. Not us. Never. But in doing so we forget one of the big lessons of social psychology—the corrupting power of evil situations. In horror movies and suspense novels, evil is the product of the depraved bad apple. In real life (as in Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments), evil more often results from toxic situations that make the whole barrel go bad. The drift towards evil can therefore occur without any conscious intent to do evil. As Mister Rogers used to say, “Good people sometimes do bad things.” Or as James Waller, a social psychologist who has studied evil, has written, “When we understand the ordinariness of extraordinary evil, we will be less surprised by evil, less likely to be unwitting contributors to evil, and perhaps better equipped to forestall evil.” Mindful of the power of the situation, my occasional advice to my teen children when heading out on a Friday night—and to myself when wishing for others’ approval—has been: “Remember who you are.” Perhaps Billy Bush can help us remember how easy it is to forget who we are and what we stand for. ... View more

Originally posted on September 28, 2016.  We social psychologists have reeled on a couple recent occasions over news reports of unreplicated studies, including one of my favorites—the pencil-in-the-teeth versus mouth of how manipulated facial expression affects mood. But then we also revel in the visible discussions of one of our bigger ideas: implicit bias, which Hillary Clinton obviously understands: Debate moderator Lester Holt: Secretary Clinton, last week, you said we’ve got to do everything possible to improve policing, to go right at implicit bias. Do you believe that police are implicitly biased against black people? Hillary Clinton: Lester, I think implicit bias is a problem for everyone, not just police. I think, unfortunately, too many of us in our great country jump to conclusions about each other. And therefore, I think we need all of us to be asking hard questions about, you know, why am I feeling this way? In some of the many experiments that reveal implicit bias, people are challenged to do as police sometimes must—to make a split-second decision whether to fire a gun, depending on whether a pictured person is holding a gun or, say, a phone. In these experiments, Blacks more than Whites are misperceived to be gun-holding. Vice presidential candidate Mike Pence apparently is unconvinced (if aware) of these experiments: “Donald Trump and I believe there's been far too much of this talk of institutional bias or racism within law enforcement.” ... View more

Originally posted on September 8, 2016. San Bernadino. Paris. Nice. Orlando. Munich. Dallas. The recent cluster of horrific events make us wonder: Is such violence socially contagious? Or do killings come in clusters merely for the reason that streaks pervade hospital births and deaths, or basketball shots and baseball hits—because random data are streakier, with more clusters, than the human mind expects? World War II Londoners noticed seeming patterns to where German bombs hit. Were the East Enders receiving more than their share because the Germans were trying to alienate the poor from the rich? After the war, a statistical analysis revealed that the bomb dispersion was actually random. But some social happenings are contagious. Airplane hijackings and suicides occur in nonrandom bunches. After Marilyn Monroe committed suicide in 1962, 303 more people than average took their lives that month. When the suicide is well-publicized (if it’s a celebrity and is reported on television), copycat suicides become especially likely. Media experiments, from the Bandura Bobo Doll experiments to the present, indicate that violence-viewing also evokes imitation. So, in some cases, have real-life murders and mass killings, as happened with the rash of school shootings during the eight days following the 1999 Columbine High School shooting rampage. Every U.S. state except Vermont experienced threats of copycat attacks. Some mass killers also are known to have been obsessed with previous mass killings. Albert Bandura We can hope that mass killings, like school shootings, may subside over time. But given a possible terrorist motive—to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election, by driving support toward an authoritarian law-and-order candidate—I am apprehensive. ... View more

Originally posted on July 25, 2016. We’ve heard the name-calling over and again: “Low energy Jeb.” “Lyin’ Ted.” “Crooked Hillary.” If repeated often enough, do such smears, independent of facts, shape public opinion? In his 60 Minutes interview with Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine (July 24, 2016), Scott Pelley recalled talking with a man who said he would vote Clinton, “‘except for that corruption problem.’ As I talked to him further, he didn't quite know what he meant by that. But that was his impression and concern.” Clinton’s reply: “There's been a concerted effort to convince people like that young man of something, nobody's quite sure what, but of something.” Persuasion researchers understand how mantras such as “Lyin’ Ted” or “Crooked Hillary” might come to be believed based on repetition alone. In experiments, mere repetition tends to make things believable. Repeated statements—“The Cadillac Seville has the best repair record”—become easy to process and remember, and thus to seem more true. Social psychologists have found such findings “scary.” And for good reason. The mere repetition effect is well understood by political manipulators. Easy-to-remember lies can overwhelm hard truths. Even repeatedly saying that a consumer claim is false can backfire. When the discounting is presented amid other true and false claims, it may lead older adults later to misremember it as true. As they forget the discounting, their lingering familiarity with the claim can make it seem believable. In the political realm, correct information may similarly fail to discount implanted misinformation. Thus, in the 2012 U.S. presidential election, false rumors—that Obama was Kenyan born, that Mitt Romney didn’t pay taxes for 10 years—resisted efforts at disconfirmation, which sometimes helped make the falsehood seem familiar and thus true. George Orwell’s world of Nineteen Eighty-Four harnessed the controlling power of mere repetition. “Freedom is slavery.” “Ignorance is strength.” “War is peace.” Is the mind-shaping world of Nineteen Eighty-Four akin to the world of 2016? What say you? ... View more

Originally posted on July 13, 2016. “America is not as divided as some have suggested,” observed President Obama in the aftermath of recent shootings by and of police officers. The President, who has previously displayed a deft understanding of behavioral science concepts, perhaps had in mind the availability heuristic—our tendency to estimate the likelihood of events based on their mental availability. Dramatic, vivid events—often those we can picture from news reports—come to mind more readily than statistical facts. Thus risks that easily pop into mind we exaggerate. Some examples: Seeing Jaws caused many folks to fear shark attacks (despite being vastly more at risk from a car accident when driving to the beach). With images of air disasters in mind, many people fear one of the safest modes of travel—commercial flying. And with graphic videos of the seemingly senseless shootings by two police officers (among the more than 900,000 U.S. law enforcement officers), it is understandable that some people are now feeling heightened fears of all police, and that the ensuing slaughter of five police officers has further heightened our sense of racial division. Post-Dallas, some folks also are worried about police officers increasingly being killed, allegedly due to President Obama’s rhetoric feeding a “war on cops” . . . although, actually, assault-caused police fatalities have declined under Obama (compared to his four predecessors). These horrific incidents—committed by but three guys with guns—are likely, as the President implies, being overgeneralized. Yet there is real evidence that racial bias and injustice are, indeed, a continuing social toxin. In a case reminiscent of Philando Castile, Amadou Diallo in 1999 was riddled with 19 bullets while pulling out his wallet, which police misperceived as a gun. Not content to stop with this anecdote, social psychologists have repeatedly asked research participants to press buttons quickly to “shoot” or not shoot men who suddenly appeared on screen, while holding either a gun or a harmless flashlight or bottle. Compared to White men holding a harmless object, Black men were "shot" more frequently (by all viewers, regardless of race). So Minnesota’s governor was probably right to suggest that, had Castile been White, he would be alive today. Acknowledging implicit, ingrained racial bias, FBI Director James Comey, in his 2015 report on “Hard Truths: Law Enforcement and Race,” said this “is why we work to design systems and processes that overcome that very human part of us all.” Moreover, while Castile’s being pulled over last week by police is merely a single data point—no basis for generalizing about law enforcement disproportionately targeting Black drivers—the FBI-reported fact is that Black drivers in the U.S. are about 30 percent more likely than White drivers to be stopped by police. And they are three times more likely to be searched. For Philando Castile, who had reportedly been stopped 52 times by police since 2002, this statistic was a lived experience. So, yes, horrific events that kill people dramatically do distort our fears. And we are, as the President suggested, prone to overgeneralize from such. Three guys with guns are not the best basis for drawing wholesale conclusions about race in America. Yet, as studies of implicit bias in the laboratory and the real world remind us, the pursuit of racial justice and reconciliation is unfinished business. And if it takes shocking events to make White folks see this, my race-expert colleague Charles Green (who blogs here) wonders: is it because of an unavailability heuristic? For those living in a nearly all-White world, are the everyday economic and social stresses of Black American life largely invisible? And is Green right to conclude that “White Americans are UNDER-concerned about racism” because, apart from dramatic happenings, there are so few memorable examples of racism available in their minds? ... View more