Yesterday afternoon I listened to a radio program on which bias was discussed and I’ve got to admit that I came away from the program knowing less than I did when I began listening. In the program they talked mostly about hidden bias or implicit bias and testing to discover biases that might be hidden even to the person being tested.
I’d have no problem with characterizing holding untrue opinions about all of the members of a group because of their membership in the group as bias. And I’ve have no problem with characterizing holding opinions which are statistically untrue of the group although it may be true for individual members of the group including a significant minority of the members of the group as bias.
I have a little more difficulty characterizing opinions that are statistically true of a group as bias even when they may not be true of individual members of the group, however unfortunate that might be for the members for whom the assertions are not true. And I definitely wouldn’t characterize believing true things about a group as bias however unfortunate it is for all of the members of the group. Both of these latter circumstances strike me as different from the former two in that the former two are offenses against justice while the latter two call for charity or even mercy.
A more difficult case is when you’re biased against all of the members of a group based on your experiences with individual members of the group. I think that’s bias but it’s not completely irrational.
All of that having been said one of the things said in the program that brought me up short was the claim that testing of implicit or hidden bias had revealed that white people in America have preferences for white people while black people in America have no such preference for black over white (or vice versa). What I wondered about was how in the world you would (without testing outside the U. S.) control for people in the majority having preferences for other people in the majority while people in a minority having preferences either for their own minority or for the majority. Indeed, I don’t think I can draw a reasonable conclusion about such a test without seeing the actual questions, knowing what the sample size was, and how the participants were selected other than that it’s possible to construct a test that would arrive at that conclusion.
I’ll admit that I have biases of my own. One of them is that I think that social scientists who are able to conduct a study that has any scientific merit whatever are rare as hen’s teeth.
Here’s my question. If it’s bias to think that ninety year old people are frail (as was the remarkable claim in the program), why is it not bias to think that people with PhD’s in psychology know any more about psychology than people who didn’t graduate from high school?
A few years ago I read an article in “Scientific American” describing a computer simulation, technically a tesselating automata, that examined “racial prejudice”. The simulation randomly distributed red and green dots on a 1000 x 1000 grid to about 70% density. There was only one rule to determine the behavior of the dots: If one of its four neighbors was the same color then it was content. If not it moved to the nearest open space that had at least one like neighbor. After 20 iterations the grid was almost totally segregated.
The rule was only about minimal affinity but produced a result even more radical than some that are attributed to racial prejudice. “Birds of a feather stick together” is a hoary aphorism. It is not universally true. Dogs and cats don’t seem to pay much attention to it. Humans do to a great extent.
I recently saw an article with the headline: “How to stay skinny – don’t hang around with fat people”. This article totally confused cause with effect. People associate strongly with people who look like themselves. A common humor theme is “Mutt and Jeff” or “Stanley and Hardy” or “Abbott and Costello” – physically contrasted comedy teams. It’s humorous because it is unusual.
I don’t draw any conclusions from these observations. It’s simply the ways of an incredibly complicated world. Any attempt at analysis will surely lead one astray.
I heard that radio segment too. I was like, duh, people are biased about most things – it’s part of being human. All of this was studied and well documented more than thirty years ago (I have some of the texts).