posted
kat, I'm not saying that there is or isn't a God. And I'm not even saying that it's easier to believe in human wisdom than in God. All I'm saying is that it is easier to believe in something verifiable than something that is not. Whether or not there is a God cannot be proven. Meanwhile, the fact of whether or not any given scientist and his reviewers are being honest can be proven.
I'm not saying there isn't some amount of faith necessary for belief in either case, or trying to place value on beliefs based on the amount of faith required. I just think that you need more in one case than the other.
Posts: 4534 | Registered: Jan 2003
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posted
Fair enough. With the scientists, you can double-check.
--
That of course depends on whether or not you are in a verifiable science. With the softer sciences, it there is much more subjective interpretation. How can you prove something that is completely subjective?
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posted
If it's good science, the data should be verifiable and reproducible within the tolerances of error. However, the conclusions drawn from the data are where the subjectivity comes in, and there I agree that it's tough.
Posts: 4534 | Registered: Jan 2003
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posted
I am taking Kat's word for it that Squick is involved in psychology.
I'm sure there are other linguists. Linguists are used to not expecting everyone to be interested in their field of study. I'm not implying Jon Boy would endorse my derision of psychology.
I'm also reacting to stuff Squick posted in Lalo's emoticons thread.
By the way, for you linguists, I was talking about the emoticons last night and my husband asked why I pronounce it /im'otacuns/ (sorry for the loose transcription) but the funny part is I was applying tri syllabic shortening to such a new lexical item. Posts: 11017 | Registered: Apr 2003
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posted
I hate to admit getting hard science info from PBS, but on Nova they were saying Einsteinian physics was incompatible with Quantum Mechanics.
Of course, it is usually soft scientists and not hard scientists who undertake to attack religion.
Linguistics, by the way, is a branch of Humanities. Thus the turf war with the "science" of psychology.
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posted
yes, and galilean physics is wrong all the time. Doesn't prevent it from being a verifiable approximation.
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posted
You know, Squicky, I'd love to get ahold of that book. It sounds interesting. And as soon as I can I'm going to take the tests you linked.
Trouble is, the semester is ending and I'm scrambling to finish my work before it does. Kind of puts a damper on extra-curricular research. In the meantime, like a number of people here I feel justified in responding to your seemingly know-it-all tone. That doesn't mean I think you're wrong. It just means I'm suspicious.
posted
I'm also unclear how the Bogardus test is supposed to be scored. The ethnicities given are Mexicans, Vietnamese and Nigerians.
They wanted you to put check marts in boxes below each of these ethinicities in responses to these questions. I could not tell what a check mark actually "meant" whether it was positive negative or neutral. Also who ever designed this test couldn't possibly have ever lived in Southern California.
quote: 3. Put a cross in as many of the boxes as your feelings dictate.
How would you feel about having members of the following groups (Mexicans, Vietnamese and Nigerians): 1. As close kin by marriage 2. In my club as personal chums 3. On my street as neighbors 4. Working alongside me in my job 5. As citizens in my country 6. As visitors to my country 7. I’d exclude them from my country
I don't know how you are supposed to express your feelings by a "cross" in a box. On a personal level 2 through 6 apply to me with regards to all of the above ethincities and quite a few extra besides. I wouldn't mind any of them as close kin by marriage either. I don't feel anything ethinically related about the friends I have of each category other than looking forward to being invited over to dinner so I can taste authentic food of that variety!
AJ
Oh yes, the test wanted your first reactions to each of the ethinic groups too. My responses: Mexicans: Lived down the street and across the street from me (I grew up in a mostly Latino neighborhood)entire families were on my swim team Vietnameese: Lived down the street from me, entire families were on my swim team. Nigerians: Older couple lived two blocks away, taught a couple of Nigerian kids to swim and had a really cool couple of college professors from Nigeria. There was the one male Nigerian engineering student that I studied with who kept calling me up while drunk, but I also had a close female study buddy in my History of Modern Africa class that was Nigerian and definitely helped. The sad thing was that she wouldn't tell the Kenyan prof teaching that she was Nigerian because she didn't want to be picked on.
posted
OK, my F-score is 2.66666666 – I’m a liberal airhead.
I can safely categorize this test as unmitigated bullsh&^. fugu13’s analysis was just about spot on.
The Bogardus one is just strange. I’m not sure what the crosses were supposed to mean, but basically 1- 6 was a “that’s cool” in each box and a “No, I wouldn’t exclude them” in each box for number 7.
What the hell does that prove?
Frankly, if these studies are based on these tests, then I’m even more skeptical than I was.
posted
I find it ironic that anyone called a book published over 40 years ago "definative." The point about astrology looks especially outdated.
I scores a 3.1 on the F test, by the way. Way too low for a frothing-at-the-mouth right wing extremist like me. Posts: 285 | Registered: Jun 1999
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posted
Shigosei, I owe you an appology. My tone was uncalled for. I read your post incorrectly as the "You only think religious people are prejudiced because God said that being gay is wrong and you think it's right." Looking at it now, I have no idea how I got that impression. Well, that's not entirely true. It's exactly the argument that I was expecting, one that I've gotten before, and I think I jumped at it way too early. Anyway, I was wrong and I should have tried to answer your question. Sorry.
The simple answer is to how prejudice is defined is that it is defined as best as conscientious people, among whom quite a few were religious, could define it. A comprehensive, but nearly bloodless definition is unjustified beliefs about a group of people. Such a definition, however, fails to convey the pervasiveness of that type of thinking, the range of it's expression, or the various other maladaptive behaviors that corolate highly with this type of thinking. Without giving lengthy consideration of these and other concepts, I don't think that it's possible to give a really accurate definition of the term.
One thing I can tell you is that a statement such as "I believe homosexuality is morally wrong because of my religious beliefs" would not be scored as prejudiced on any of the scales that I know of. Rather, statements such as "I wouldn't hire someone I know to be homosexual." or "Homosexuals are all <insert characteristic here>" would score.
In a very real sense, the definition of prejudice has been tied up with the tests of it. These methods for determining prejudice have been constantly evolving to be both generally more accurate and to fit changes in the social climate. For example, the Bogardus Social Distance Scale, which I provided a link to, was a much more effective determiner of prejudice when it was socially acceptable to claim that other groups had no right to be anywhere near you. Later scales have had to rely on more subtle measures.
The scales that have been adopted by the majority of the community studying prejudice are not formed by people who want to screw over Christianity. For example, I doubt that anyone could claim that the Bogardus scale was biased against religious people, and yet it was the primary scale used in the early studies. A significant number of people who work in this field are themselves Christians or Jews.
Rather, there is a genuine concern with construct validity. One of the methods of ensuring this is to check the correlations to other personality assesments to see that the same type of relationship exists between the new scale and these measures and between older scales. If the tests can be shown to be either invalid or unreliable, they are abandoned. Certain scales have shown to be so useful, such as Allport's Religious Orientation Scale (what with the intrinsic/extrinsic distinction), that they become touchstones of the field and spawn almost a field of their own.
The prejudice scales that were used corolated highly with all manners of other scales of psychological weaknesses, perhaps most strongly with the F-Scale of authoritarianism. I provided a link to one of the early versions of this test to give an idea of the types of thinking that form the core idea of authoritarianism. Even were the prejudice tests poor predictors of prejudicial thinking and behavior, such corolations would still make them useful in determining psychological fitness.
What it boils down to is the question of whether or not you can trust the measures of prejudice. I stand by my earlier statement that if you, without knowing anything about those scales, are unwilling to believe that they are valid, there is nothing I can say that will change your mind. Because of copyright restrictions I can't reproduce any tests except for the very early ones that are no longer used. However, the tests and the studies are probably readily available in your library's central branch. I am more than willing to talk about problems that you have with specific tests or experiments, but I have no desire to counter an attitude of "Those tests, which I know nothing about, must be wrong because they suggest things that disagree with what I want to believe." There are actually objective methods of assessing the validity of these tests, and as such, objective methods of assessing, within a certain defined error, the amount of prejudice in a population.
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posted
I've got a ton of justification for what I said, but you know what, I don't think that it's important. As I freely admitted in my first post, I am both arrogant and a jackass. If you wish to claim I'm a bad guy, go right ahead. As I see it, I try not to be. I fail sometimes. Either way, I don't it particularly affects the truthfulness of what I say.
Rather, one of the descriptions that people used for at least one of my posts is thought-provoking. This is not the first, not the fifth, nor even the tenth time that I've posted things in this vein (not the prejudice thing, but rather the underlying issues) and I've rarely seen evidence that people have considered what I had to say. So, I am very interested, what thoughts did it provoke?
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
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quote:MrSquicky I have no desire to counter an attitude of "Those tests, which I know nothing about, must be wrong because they suggest things that disagree with what I want to believe."
And no one has said that in this thread. The only thing that’s been said along those lines is, “Here are some summarized results from some tests which I won’t bother to describe that support a particular criticism of religion.”
When pressed for clarification, you denounced the request for clarification as defensiveness and posted links to two tests, which attracted richly-deserved derision.
You further state that your quoted statement above is the type of reaction of that you expected, but that you don’t want to discuss it.
The question must be asked, why did you make a post to a discussion forum when you never intended to discuss the responses you expected to get? You made the statement, “It's exactly the argument that I was expecting, one that I've gotten before, and I think I jumped at it way too early.” It sounds like you made a post designed to elicit an easily attacked response just so you could have the pleasure of attacking it.
You also dismiss any skepticism or outright refutation as defensiveness and unworthy of discussion. Again, if disagreeing or doubting was going to elicit this discussion, why did you post on a discussion board?
Believe it or not, most people on this board are a) smart enough to form preliminary opinions on this topic just from the information in this thread, and b) smart enough to modify these opinions if additional info on the thread or further independent research warrants it. The fact that we aren’t all interested in pursuing further independent research is a more a statement of the poor opinion several of us seemed to have formed about it based on your summary and links.
The fact remains that the two example of the tests you gave use were laughable. No other examples are forthcoming.
posted
fugu, I think that it is a mistake to judge a test from the 1940s by today's standards. Also, I do know that any Likert style tests (strongly agree to strongly disagree, or how strongly do you agree 1-10, etc.) must be given with strict instructions and with a person there to answer any questions you might have. To be honest, I don't know that much about the genesis of the f-scale. I know that it seemed to work at the time and it and it's later version were some of the central parts of a hotly debated field. Also, it has some pretty impressive corolations to other similar type tests. I've never had a huge interest in psychometrics beyond the basics, except for how to go about disagreeing with a test on objective grounds. If it works, I use it. I didn't link the test as some sort of valid test that you can use, but rather to illustrate some of the fundamental areas that make up the idea of authoritarianism. To be honest, I have some problems with the specific questions on this test, but I am aware of the validty of the underlying concepts that it was built on.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
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posted
Hey, no problem. Some of the fault is mine. I was asking for that by choosing such an inflamatory topic as homosexuality. I thought it would be the most relevant example since it is such a divisive issue in society and Christianity today, but I think I should have used something else to explain my question.
Thanks for clarifying the definition of prejudice. I'm sort of surprised that anyone would admit to having the attitude "I wouldn't hire (a Latino, a homosexual, a woman, etc.)" Maybe people are more honest on anonymous surveys. Actually, I guess I shouldn't be that surprised. There are plenty of people out there who are visibly prejudiced. There's the old "no interracial dating" rule at Bob Jones University, for example. I can't believe they kept that around for so long.
By the way, please don't take any of the criticism on this thread as an indication we don't like serious discussion. It's nice to have something solid amidst all the fluff.
Edit: in response to Squicky's post a few posts up.
posted
I apologize, I did not get that impression when you called it the test of authoritarianism. I didn't realize you were not necessarily referring to your approval of it, but its importance in the field.
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posted
Yeah, I wasn't really careful with that list. I've been rushing to get something rather import done and it's been crashing at all the most inconvenient points and I've had to redesign a central part once already, so I just sort of put it out there. Another thing I should hve mentioned about it is that that was by no means a full test. You can't get a lot with only 10 questions.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
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posted
I guess more what I want to know about predjuice is not that it exists, but what can we DO about it. I'm an engineer, I want something concrete that I can wrap my mind around to get productive solutions. It seems like the actuall origins of predudices are too complex to pidgeon hole (or there are a lot of pidgeon holes) so how do you go about correcting the problem when they are lots of small different ones rather than one big one?
posted
Possibly. Or it could mean that the way prejudice is expressed -- the semiotics of it -- is simply more subtle. Or it could mean that test design is more sophisticated now -- that academics have improved the way they approach these things.
-- BUT --
In essence, I have serious reservations about the viability of testing things like prejudice beyond very gross means. It's very hard, imo, for test design not to reflect the biases of the researchers and to not lead subjects to certain conclusions.
So my question for Squick would be [I pay attention -- but I'd be more convinced if you didn't seem so caught up in your discipline (of course, I'm trapped to a certain extent in mine so it's all good)] how are these tests different from poltical polling or product marketing or any of the other 'soft' science attempts to capture data via surveys?
[quote]I've got to admit, I expected a much different reaction to my post. I'm not sure if people got the rather extreme implications of that information. In a way, it's a scientific suggestion that generally, a person claiming to be religious and acting on religious motives, is probably rather acting on their psychological weaknesses. It's stuff like this and the high correlation between certain measures of religiousity and f-scale scores, that makes me think that mainstream contemporary religion is an extremely worrying social force. At least on these specific measures of immaturity, the mast majority of the religious population show them to be among the least mature people in our society. quote]
The prejudiced part of me wants to agree with this and some of Squick's other conclusions because I have my own hang-ups with 'religious' people -- I also believe many of them are 'immature.' At the same time, what's more troubling to me is that, from what I can tell, most academics just don't *get* religion and religious movements and not only that, but they themselves tend to have rather immature beliefs in that regard.
My second question for squick is: exactly what are the looming negative implications for American society that you see as a result of this immaturity on the part of many religious groups? Why should this be such a cause for concern? What claims can you make about the likely negative behavior or attitudes of the irrational, 'immature' religious that the un- or non-religious are immune to or less prone to as a group?
Posts: 3423 | Registered: Aug 2001
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posted
Discrimination is a funny old word. It can mean so many different things depending on where it’s used. A basic, vanilla definition is the process by which two or more stimuli are responded to differently. However, when applied to the real world, issues of what this process actually is and why it is used lead to very different implementations.
A point I made elsewhere that is an extremely important part of social science theory is the difference between genotypes and phenotypes. In this context, these two words function pretty similarly to when they are used in a discussion of genetics. They are sort of a fancy way of making the distinction between the underlying reason or motivation for something happening and what happened. I'll be returning to this point often in what follows.
Applying it to the concept of discrimination, we return to the question: why do people discriminate?
First and foremost, it's because they should. Many times people have adequate reason to believe that things are different from each other. A square is not a circle and it's also quite different from a squire. Being able to pick up on how things are different and act according to these differences is fundamental to an organism's survival. At the very least, it's what keeps us from falling madly in love with, say, a parking meter. Regardless of anything else, that alone makes me believe that it's a good thing.
In non-abstract situations, it's rare that we ever have enough information to be 100% confident that our discriminations are justified. However, this is just a part of life and shouldn't be regarded as a bad thing, except in the aforementioned cases of parkometaphilia.
In other cases, people come to discriminate based on irrelevant stimuli. For example, one of the stronger theories on the development of phobias is that phobic people overgeneralize their fear associations to stimuli that aren't actually threatening. So a person uses irrelevant signals to tell them when to be afraid.
If we combine these two things - incompleteness and attention to unimportant details - we can show how discrimination can develop in cases where it isn't warranted. For example, Benjamin Franklin believed for much of his life that blacks where inherently inferior to whites when it came to intelligence. However, late in his life, he had chance to observe a classroom full of black children, and, as he reported later, he could see no difference between how well they learned and how well white children learned. Ben gave up his old ideas and became a committed abolitionist.
If this were all there were to it, the problems of prejudice and discrimination wouldn't be that big a deal. However, very few people are as secure as Ben Franklin was. Prejudice, as the term is commonly used, is a horse of a completely different color, or sex, or nationality, or whatever.
Not surprisingly, there was a huge amount of interest in understanding prejudice following the end of World War II. During this time, there were dozens of ways suggested to measure and predict prejudice against specific groups (e.g. the Jews, Negroes) and as a general concept. Careful studies matching the scores of these scales to actual observed behavior winnowed these tests down to the ones with the highest apparent accuracy.
One of the things that researchers found was that prejudice generally did not exist as a stand-alone thing. High scores on tests of prejudice or relatively many observed incidents of prejudicial behavior were accompanied by high scores or a high incidence of other maladjusted behaviors. For example, high prejudiced people were more likely to distort their perceptions or memories from reality. As part of this, they were more susceptible to the actor/observer bias and it’s close cousin, the fundamental attribution error. They tended to be more threat-oriented, more anxious, and thus to show more so-called neurotic symptoms. There was a wider difference between their public persona and their inner state.
As I stated above, Allport provided a list of behaviors that correlated highly to prejudice and constituted what he considered “The Prejudiced Personality”. I’ll sketch these out in greater detail by summarizing directly from the book.
Ambiguity toward parents: Prejudiced people showed a greater level of ambiguity towards their parents. In one study of female college students tested for anti-Semitism, the researchers found that “without exception these girls declared that they liked their parents.” Any type of criticism towards their parents was rare, much rarer than the study population of non-anti-Semitic girls. However, projective tests such as the thematic apperception test showed that the anti-Semitic girls showed that “a preponderance of [their] responses to parental figures accused them of meanness and cruelty, and betrayed jealousy, suspicion, and hostility on the part of the daughter.” As stated above, the non-anti-Semitic girls were more openly critical of their parents, but they showed much less hostility in the projective tests. –This next is not from the book - Later research has suggested a cause for this behavior by showing that children raised by parents with an authoritarian parenting style tend to score high for prejudice.
Moralism: Moralism is defined here by a “strict insistence on cleanliness, good manners, [and] conventions.” When asked, “What is the most embarrassing experience?”, the anti-Semitic girls responded “in terms of violations of mores and conventions in public.” The less prejudiced girls more often spoke of personal failings, such as “failing to live up to a friend’s expectations.” Studies with children found that the more prejudiced children generally saw the make up a of “perfect boy or girl” as being a mixture of “purity, cleanliness, [and] good manners”, while the less prejudiced children were more likely to describe a child who was a good companion or fun to be around.
Dichotomization: Closely related to moralism, dichotomization is the tendency to break things down into only two, mutually exclusive categories. For example, “If you are not with us, you’re against us.” or “There is only one right way to do anything.” However, this process of dichotomization generally goes far beyond moral judgments. It is a style of thinking that pervades the way a person sees the world. Prejudiced people were more likely to express of agree with dichotomizing statements. They also expressed a higher preference for classification systems that had only two categories.
Need for Definiteness: Another highly related concept is the need for definiteness. Again, this is a highly pervasive quality of a person’s thinking. To illustrate this point, Allport refers to the autokinetic effect, a classic perceptual experimental situation. This is a great situation to study reaction to ambiguity because there literally isn’t any right answer. However, researchers have consistently found that people tend to anchor their perceptions in how much it moves and, sometimes, the direction that it moved in. Prejudiced people tended to establish these norms earlier, were more likely to insist that the light only moved in one direction, and had less deviation in the amount they claimed the light moved.
Another manifestation of this need for definiteness is the reluctance to admit that you don’t know about something. Prejudiced people have been shown across a wide range of studies to be much less likely to say “I don’t know.” In one experiment, the subjects were asked to associate names with faces. High prejudice subjects made more incorrect guesses in comparison to the low prejudice subjects, who were much more likely to say they had no idea and thus refuse to answer. In another study, an analysis of a public opinion poll revealed that people scoring high in anti-Semitism were less likely to given a “Don’t know” response.
In studies – not contained in this book - of functional fixedness, prejudiced people were shown to be more likely to suffer from failing to rethink previously effective solutions.
Externalization: Prejudiced people tend to view things, especially unpleasant things as originating outside themselves. They are more likely to engage in projection. Allport brings up the concept of extropuntiveness, which is a fancy way of saying excuse making. When something goes wrong, it is someone or something else’s fault. Another expression of this is the translation of a hated group into a hating group, a group that you wants to attack into a group that is attacking you.
Institutionalism: This is a no-brainer to me. I’m going to just quote because it probably isn’t for others.
quote:The person with character-conditioned prejudice likes order, but especially social order. In his clear-cut institutional memberships, he finds the safety and definiteness that he needs. Lodges, schools, churches, the nation, may serve as a defense against the disquiet in his personal life. To lean on them saves him from leaning on himself.
Research shows that, by and large, prejudiced people are more devoted to institutions than are the unprejudiced. Anti-Semitic college girls are more wrapped up in the sororities; they are more institutionally religious; they are more intensely “patriotic.” Asked “What is the most awe-inspiring experience?” they usually answer in terms of external patriotic and religious events.
Many studies have discovered a close link between prejudice and “patriotism.” …[E]xtreme bigots are almost always super-patriots. The tie between nationalism and persecution of minority groups was clearly seen in Nazi Germany. It seems to hold for other countries as well. One investigation…in a suburban American community, among middle-class people, is particularly revealing…While there was some evidence that insecurity and frustration do play a part in the nexus of anti-Semitism, the investigators found that the most important single factor is “national involvement.”…
The findings of this research are important. It will be noted that the anti-Semite is not merely a bundle of negative attitudes. Rather he is trying to do something: namely, to find an island of institutional safety and security. The nation is the island he selects. It is a positive anchorage; it is his country right or wrong; it is higher than humanity; more desirable than a world state. It has the definiteness he needs. The research establishes the fact that the higher the degree of nationalism, the higher the anti-Semitism.
Note the emphasis here is upon positive security. Anti-Semitism is not merely the shadow that fear and anxiety cast. Plenty of apprehensive and frustrated people never develop into anti-Semites. What is important is the way fear and frustration are handled. The institutionalistic way-especially the nationalistic-seems to be the nub of the matter.
What happens is that the prejudiced person defines “nation” to fit his needs…The nation is first of all a protection (the chief protection) of him as an individual. It is his in-group. He sees no contradiction in ruling out its beneficent orbit those whom he regards as threatening intruders and enemies (namely, American minorities). What is more, the nation stands for the status quo. It is a conservative agent; within it are all the devices for safe living that he approves. His nationalism is a form of conservativism. According to his definition. The nation is that which resists change. It follows that he distrusts liberals, reformers, supporters of the Bill of Rights, and other “commies”: they threaten to change his safe conception of what the nation means.”
Whew that’s a mouthful. I’m glad I’ve got the scanner text recognition program.
Authoritarianism: Authoritarianism is whole big can of worms, certainly bigger than prejudice. Allport’s description is necessarily disadvantaged because he was writing prior to the Milgram experiment, which is now one of the main bases for any understanding of authoritarianism. However, the theoretical foundations for a conception of authoritarianism had already been laid. Erich Fromm had written what is still perhaps the best exploration of this topic, his book Escape from Freedom, in 1941. Fromm made the argument that the basis for authoritarianism is a sadomasochistic world orientation, where you are submissive towards those above you and abusive towards those below you. If you are interested in learning more about this topic, I highly recommend Fromm’s book, and I think that Stanley Milgram’s book giving an account of his famous experiment, Obedience to Authority, should be required reading in any educational system.
To simplify, authoritarianism is a valuing of authority and power over personal freedom and change. The authoritarian person is primarily interested in power relationships. His solution to pretty much any problem is more “discipline”, where discipline is defined as conformity to authority or the application of external force.
It’s close to a certainty that prejudice is highly correlated with authoritarianism. So much so that part of the verification of new tests of prejudice is checking how well they correlate with tests of authoritarianism.
So anyway, that’s a little section of what is still considered one of the most important books ever written about prejudice. I tried to keep the above purely informational. The only arguments I included were those in the text itself. Now I’m going to start with what I think.
I haven’t yet dealt explicitly with the why of prejudice. I think that the above description of the prejudiced personality makes this almost redundant, but I’m an engineer as well as a psychologist, so I like redundancy.
One very important question that comes up in regards to prejudice is how to tell the difference between legitimate or even incomplete info discrimination and full-out prejudice. From a very superficial viewpoint, it can be difficult to judge. However, any kind of depth analysis revealed that there is a huge difference between the two. It’s the difference between believing in something and wanting to believe in something. The prejudiced person is so loud in their belief and so resistant to change, not because their belief is strong, but rather because it is so weak. They want to believe that it is true, so they self-deceive and avoid situations they can and twist ones that they cannot so that they can maintain this belief. Because, without it, a huge chunk of what they use to feel safe disappears.
Prejudice is a purposive behavior. People are prejudiced because it helps them get what they want. These goals can vary widely, but what they actually are unimportant in the general case. They all boil down to achieving safety or power.
I mentioned the Milgram experiment already. One aspect of this experiment that is often overlooked is what it has to say about morality formation. Obviously, this experiment caused a great deal of stress by putting people’s need to submit to authority in conflict with people’s desire not to shock another person to death. Nearly all of Milgram’s subjects exhibited signs of extreme stress. An interesting corollary to this is that many of them also exhibited behaviors to cope with this stress. One of these behaviors was the formation of a moral justification for the shocks. Some of the subjects reduced their stress by clinging to belief that somehow the innocent person they were shocking deserved it.
Another study that sheds light onto this aspect of prejudice formation is the Muzafer Sherif’s classic Robber’s Cave study. Sherif was one of the major contributors to the field of group dynamics and as such was very interested in the formation of group norms. In this study, he found that the formation of an in-group led to a moral elevation of that group and a degradation of the out-group. This shifting of norms followed the pattern of out-group prejudice confirmed by countless other studies. Of particular interest to this discussion is how, while the individual subjects earnestly claimed that each of the people in their group was different from each other, they tended to regard the members of the other group as being more or less uniform. To put it another way, they formed a prejudice against the other group.
I can keep going on like this, but I think that it is clear that there is some pretty strong evidence that when you want to do something bad to others, it is common to form prejudicial attitudes toward them.
However, it is not just to deal with the stress caused by conflict with a certain group that people form prejudices against that group. One of the interesting things that early researchers found while looking into anti-Semitism is that there was a significant difference between American anti-Semitism and European and other anti-Semitism. To wit, it was extremely uncommon to find Jews accused of sexual perversion in America, but this was one of the major complaints against them in Europe. It’s not that America didn’t have a group that they associated with sexual perversion; it just wasn’t the Jews. Rather, Blacks were frequently the depraved sex-addicts. Some researchers found the exact same complaints, down to wording, being levied against Jews in Europe, but Blacks in America.
Now, it’s possible that European Jews were just more lusty and lascivious than Americans. It’s possible that Blacks were somehow inheritors of this same lusty lifestyle. I think that it’s more likely that the prejudiced people in question had some sexual anxiety that they needed to project onto someone. Since the Europeans didn’t really have Blacks to put it on, they attached it to the always popular Jews.
Several studies have shown a similar pattern. Oftentimes, the bad attributes most often associated with a prejudiced against group, excepting socially reinforced stereotypes, corresponded nicely to the particular pressures that a person was under.
So, how do we eliminate prejudice? The simple answer is to do away with the underlying cause. If we could cure it like Alvin cured Lolla-Wossiky’s drunkenness, by removing the darkness that it was there to block out, man, that would be so sweet. Unfortunately, saving David Blaine, I can’t think of anyone who has that kind of magical power. And all I got from repeatedly contacting David was a restraining order and an invitation to keep out of Maryland for the rest of my natural life.
I’ve got lots of ideas for realistic solutions. That’s pretty much what I do, when I’m not doing other stuff, anyway. They all pretty much center around increasing the general maturity of people. However, this is already by far the longest thing I’ve ever posted and, let’s face it, I don’t think anyone here has the background in social dynamics or even psychology in general to get much out of the brief version. One major thing that I can offer is that people need to educate themselves about prejudice so that they can learn to recognize it, both in others and, more importantly, in themselves, and to deal with it more effectively. I feel that most of the contemporary ways of dealing with prejudice are doomed to fail because the people formulating them and implementing them rarely have any significant understanding of the problem they are facing.
Another important thing to keep in mind is that, as prejudice is a purposive behavior, it is possible to sort of do away with it and yet not have any increase in maturity. If we change the social structure such that prejudice ceases to do a good job of getting people what they want, they'll stop doing it and start doing something else that works better. Likewise, making it "naughty" for people to express prejudice may stop them from doing so in social situations but rarely has much success reducing the level of prejudice in that person.
A personal commitment to education is so important. I’m asking you, if you think that this is an important issue, don’t just take my word for it. Read up on it yourself. The possibility for social and personal change is much greater in the second case, especially in terms of general maturity.
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People have brought up that non-religious or differently religious groups have committed the same types of atrocities and have the same bad aspects that I am ascribing to religious people. As I've said in multiple other instances, this is exactly my point. What I am describing is not an intrinsic quality of religion. Rather, it is common to just about all situations where there are immature people. Certain situations and social/belief structures encourage prejudice formation or are more appealing to prejudiced people. I feel that religion, as it commonly conceived in America, constitutes such a situation. I'd say the same for Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and pretty much any other thing you want to bring up. I'm not claiming that religion causes this and thus we should not expect it in non-religion social systems. Rather I am saying that it specifically those aspects that religions share with these other situations that cause these sorts of thing.
Look, I don't have a problem with religion per se. I find the subject fascinating from both an intellectual and a spiritual standpoint. It has never been my intention to attack religion or any specific religion as a concept. I remain an enthusiastic supporter of religion in most of its forms.
My answer to what I see as some severe problems in the current state of religions in America is not, and never has been, to do away with or destroy religions. Rather, I believe as some many other researchers on this topic do, that the people who self-identify as religious and yet are highly prejudiced are generally twisting their religion. I have a great respect for the dedicated religious person who, as I have described, tends to be less prejudiced. I have known such people in my life and I consider myself blessed because of it. My answer is that people should come to understand why these people are how they are and work to become more like them.
I think that our society can only become better if there is a marked increase in maturely religious people. That's my goal. Not just that, I feel that religion is probably one of the best places to foment the kind of things that are going to lead to a more mature society.
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Thank you for your long explanation. I'm going to read and digest it more tomorrow, and hopefully come up with semi-intelligent question or two.
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Banna (is it ok that I always think of you as BananaOj?), Let me know if I didn't do a good job of explaining or linking to explanations of any of the concepts. I'm so immersed in the field that I sometimes assume people are going to understand things when I actually provide a woefully inadequate description. Also, I've got tons else more to write - that was the short version - so I'm willing to expand on any of the ideas there. I've got a wonderful little bit on the Chinese concept of li and Qing-Jao's teleological tracing of woodlines that I'm hoping to get around to.
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quote:Thank you for your long explanation. I'm going to read and digest it more tomorrow, and hopefully come up with semi-intelligent question or two.
(Don't let Squick's scanner text recognition program and overweening ego make you use self-depricating language. I think he secretly likes it.)
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So, Squicky...if you brought it up before, I've lost track. What do you believe constitutes mature religion?
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/sidebar Squicky, the reason why it is BannaOj instead of BananaOj is the result of a typo. My real name is Anna Jo, so it was an understandable typo at the time since my fingers are used to putting the Ns together. But I decided to keep it, because it is available as a screenname on most places I belong to.
I did have the nickname Banana for a long time and I still answer to it, so calling me Banana is cool. It was the result of a highlighter yellow swimsuit I wore when I was on the swim team playing water polo. Then the guys decided I was a vicious water polo player cause I could beat them up without resorting to dirty tricks which was how the nickname OJ was acquired. I answer to AJ too, or "Hey you!"
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Macc, That's sort of like asking what does a mature government look like. It's a mu question. Like I brought up before, what I'm talking about is the difference between genotypes and phenotypes. Institutions are phenotypes. They are the outward expression of the formative material of the people who make them up. A mature religion is one made up of mature people. I have no way of commenting on the range of other qualities that it might have. For example, it's quite within the range of values that a "mature" religion would believe that homosexuality is a sin. The main thing is that this wouldn't be a matter of prejudice, but rather a justified discrimination.
If that sounds like a cop out, that's because it is, in a way. We do know somethings that could aid this description. That is, we know some of what at least a form of a mature person looks like and what some maturing institutions look like.
What we can say about maturity from a scientific context is pretty much limited to talking about what it is not. We know that it is not immaturity and we have some scientifically justified ideas of what immaturity is. Other than that, it's kind of like asking a doctor what a healthy person looks like.
However, what we can do is look at people who are not immature to look for commonalities and form theories about maturity that we then put into practice. Hardly scientific, but that doesn't mean that it isn't valuable.
Thankfully, there's a tradition in psychology of systematically doing just that. For my money, nobody does it better than Abraham Maslow. Not only did he come up with some interesting theories, but his ideas about management, captured best in the book Maslow on Management (an edited and annotated collection of his earlier, much more disorganized writings on management), were applied in the real world. They were so successful that one of the companies who implemented his ideas set him up with a sinecure with the only directive being for him to keep working on his ideas.
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A point I've been trying to get across and never seem to be able to is that there are two distinctly different ways of thinking that we're talking about here. Prejudicial thinking rests on unstable reasons for believing in something. The rightness of a statement, the respect given someone, the interest in looking at ideas are all determined by how well they fit in with a person's worldview. Proof for anything in this style of thinking is extremely subjective. ehhh...That's not really getting what I'm trying to say. It's more that a prejudiced person specifically looks only for subjective proof and avoid objective reasoning.
For there are objective reasons for things. For example, it's possible that psychology is objectively not a science. There is a set definition of what a science is, a list of requirements that has to be fulfilled before something can be considered a science. If psychology doesn't meet these characteristics, it isn't a science. There are definitely areas that don't meet these requirements, but there are also large areas that do. So I have to conclude that people who claim otherwise, unless they provide me with an explanation of how these parts don't fulfill the requirements, are either ignorant of the nature of science or of psychology.
Likewise, there are objective grounds for criticizing something, say religion. This certainly doesn't mean that any complaint against religion is worthy of respect. I said above that I am upset that the majority of criticisms brought against religion are ignorant and puerile. These people are themselves engaging in prejudice, or at the very least poor thinking.
One of the things drilled into my head in my training in psychology was how to determine what could justifiably said from a set of data. This sense of intellectual integrity was place foremost in important, before theory or measures or facts. So, yes, regardless of the issue, it bothers me when people form their opinions based on casual ignorance. As well as being an expression of the underlying insecurities I mentioned above, prejudice is also just about the supreme manifestation of this kind of thinking. It's one of the reasons that prejudiced people almost invariably turn their prejudicial thinking towards "intellectuals", focusing on the regretably abundant examples of immature, prejudicial people in intellectual roles to discount all "academics" and even the objective way of thinking.
Gordon Zahn, in his book German Catholics and Hitler's Wars responded to this type of thinking better than I can. It certainly lends a degree a credibility that Zahn, like a not insignificant number of the researchers who investigated the role of prejudice in religion, is religious, attached to a religious university, and publishing in a religious medium. Anyway, here's what he had to say:
quote:THE CATHOLIC SCHOLAR who would engage in research having the potential for controversy involved in the study to be presented in the forthcoming pages is forced to address himself at the very outset to a critical question. The question was clearly expressed by Yves Congar, O.P., in a recent issue of Perspectives:
- Can we, without imprudence, expose evils and abuses in the history of the Church and publish works of self-criticism and self-accusation? In researches and avowals of this kind is there not some risk of disturbing the confidence of the faithful and, in fact, of promoting a kind of religious indifferentism which is the very vestibule of neopaganism? -
This study does not set out to “expose evils and abuses”; it will, however, reveal some grievous mistakes in judgment and action, and perhaps some rather critical inadequacies in certain prevailing theological formulations. The question, therefore, is pertinent. Congar’s answer is pertinent, too. As he points out, the workings of the Holy Spirit within us begin with what he terms “His first act— to convince us of sin.” Thus what many may choose to dismiss or denounce as a public washing of dirty linen may also be viewed asa probing search for causes and consequences of moral failures which, if conducted and received in a spirit of honesty and humility, can only work to benefit and perfect the Church as a temporal social institution charged with a divine mission and responsibility.
But this is only part of the answer. Equally pertinent, though not stressed by Congar, is the professional responsibility of the scholar and scientist. Our age seems to have abandoned the true meaning of the word “profession” as a state of life entered upon in a spirit of total commitment to a special set of responsibilities and consecrated to the service of the truth. Except for religion, our professions are no longer marked by a public taking or “profession” of vows; where we do find some renmants of this practice—as in the medical and, to a lesser extent, legal professions—are generally regarded as little more than ceremonial formalities. Nevertheless the profession of the scholar must imply a conscious dedication to the service of the truth, the advancement of knowledge, and the correction and, wherever possible, elimination of error. In this light, then, the answer to our question given by the Catholic scholar who would remain true to his professional responsibilities has to be that mistakes and weaknesses—even evils and abuses— must be exposed wherever and whenever they are discovered. And he will expose them in the confident faith that, however much of an embarrassment his revelations might at first present, they will in the long run contribute to the welfare of the Church, which proclaims that Truth is One, and which therefore insists that any apparent divergence between fact and faith must be tested and explored and ultimately reconciled in that unity of truth.
To return to Congar:
- The Church considered as a community lives according to laws analogous, positis ponendis, to those of any other society. In the disordered conditions and the great tragedies in which a complex and finally collective responsibility must be acknowledged, there are nevertheless some persons responsible in the first degree and others in the second degree. That second-degree responsibility can come from cowardice or connivance. In the Church more than in other societies there is a connection between disordered conditions and great tradgedies. One might even say that tradgedies are the result of inveterate and accepted shortcomings at the level of everyday practice. Collective responsibility is incurred at the level of pastoral observances, of devotions, by what is preached and what is not preached.
edit:I tried to make it clearer what parts of the quoted section were themselves quotes.
quote:So I have to conclude that people who claim otherwise, unless they provide me with an explanation of how these parts don't fulfill the requirements, are either ignorant of the nature of science or of psychology.
Or else they've thought about it/studied it separately on their own, are personally satisfied with their opinions, musing out loud, and don't see the need to justify themselves.
That's possible, too.
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I'm wondering what the role of experience plays. Surely being open-minded does not mean never taking into account the experiences and consequences that have come from previous actions.
quote:MrSquicky said: People have brought up that non-religious or differently religious groups have committed the same types of atrocities and have the same bad aspects that I am ascribing to religious people. As I've said in multiple other instances, this is exactly my point.
Those examples were only brought up in response to this statement of yours:
quote:MrSquicky said: As to the second question, it is only a matter of personal belief that I believe that prejudice and authoritarianism is more dangerous in religious people than in other groups.
How does this previous statement agree with:
quote:MrSquicky said: What I am describing is not an intrinsic quality of religion. Rather, it is common to just about all situations where there are immature people. Certain situations and social/belief structures encourage prejudice formation or are more appealing to prejudiced people. I feel that religion, as it commonly conceived in America, constitutes such a situation. I'd say the same for Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and pretty much any other thing you want to bring up. I'm not claiming that religion causes this and thus we should not expect it in non-religion social systems. Rather I am saying that it specifically those aspects that religions share with these other situations that cause these sorts of thing.
Is it the same? Is it more dangerous? This is not just a nit, this is an important point in the discussion as you framed it.
My point in my previous post about non-religious atrocities was that strong beliefs lead to strong actions. The “goodness” or “badness” of the beliefs will go a long way to determining if the results are good or bad.
I wish I had more time to participate in this discussion, but exams are coming up. I would like to ad one more substantive comment:
quote:MrSquicky said: In one experiment, the subjects were asked to associate names with faces. High prejudice subjects made more incorrect guesses in comparison to the low prejudice subjects, who were much more likely to say they had no idea and thus refuse to answer.
I’m really doubtful on this technique. I would say people more likely to admit they don’t know something have a greater need for definiteness. A person 70% sure of a fact who hazards a guess can be said to require less definiteness in acting on that knowledge than someone who won’t hazard a guess at all. I’m assuming the test-givers asked people to give names and did not instruct people to assign percent probabilities to the answers (this would fit my limited-to-undergraduate-psychology experience). If so, this isn’t testing “need for definiteness” as much as “willingness to be wrong.”
As to the autokinetic effect, I would say it does not demonstrate a “need for definiteness” so much as a quicker pattern acceptance reflex – that is, how fast someone derives a general rule from a specific instance of a pattern. Given that both high-“prejudiced” and low-“prejudiced” people anchor to their perceived pattern, the big difference is speed of pattern establishment, not need for definiteness.
The only thing we really know from this experiment is that people who are high-“prejudiced”
This is the root of my skepticism with these experiments – interpreting the results. And my overriding concern – and the reason I quote “prejudice” above – is not addressed in your excellent explanations above: How does someone test for high- or low- “prejudiced” attitudes?
Any problems with testing for the other characteristics are moot if there is no reliable way to test for prejudice. At best a psychologist can say “People who generally respond to test A in X manner also respond to test B in Y manner.” This may lead to predictive theories, but their explanatory value is highly questionable.
The same problem exists in quantum physics. It’s the most accurately predictive scientific theory (supporting predictions empirically validated to the 14th decimal point). It provides an excellent means for predicting how matter and energy will behave in certain conditions. However, it provides little guidance to thinking about the physical properties (other than those being predicted) of the universe, i.e., why the theory works so well.
Contrast this to special relativity, whose mathematical formulas are entirely entwined with a physical view of the cosmos. The theory is more satisfying and accessible because it is both predictive and explanative.
There is a much greater possibility for bias, conscious or unconscious, in the design, conduct, and interpretation of psychological experiments given their subjective nature.
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Dagonee, While there are specific cases of structural and also doctrinal (government by divine right, for example) aspects of, well, Christianity that I believe exacerbate the problems presented by a prejudicial and authoritarian populace, that's not at all what was I saying by saying that they are dangerous. If you read my statements directly after that part you quoted, you'll notice that I focused on the impossibility of reality testing religious beliefs. Because there is no standard of proof that we can refer to as to the "rightness" of religious beliefs, it's harder to check the immature impulses that often get bound up in them.
The list of experiments I provided exploring the need for definiteness was by no means comprehensive. You need to understand the process that verification of a theory works in the field. People don't do two experiements and then call it a day. Rather, there are always objections that form the basis for other experiments. In a similar situation to QM gravity taking over from Newtonian, if the results of these experiments fit one explanation better than another, the old explanation is either revised or scrapped. Read an introduction to any experiemental psych article. You're going to find that it is necessary to sketch out the literature both for and against your hypothesis before you even start to present your own theory.
Also, I thought I explained that the verification for tests of prejudice is a complicated process that, as one of its steps, involved testing them against the level of prejudicial behavior. Apparently I didn't do a good enough job. If people who score high on a test of prejudice aren't more likely to act in a prejudicial manner, the test isn't any good. In testing, discrimination takes yet another meaing. In psychometrics, a test is only considered valid if it can be shown to discriminate between the groups that it is testing.
How do I put this nicely? You seem to be very quick to make dedinite pronouncements about a field that you don't seem to know much about. To me, your objections are boringly innaccurate. They are statements seemingly without any factual basis. By that I mean that you seem to know little about the field but make statements that are only justifiable if you did. Thus, I feel that your confidence is unwarrented.
I will state once, very clearly for the record, that psychologists are not all immature, religion-hating, unscientific people whose only method of proof is "yeah, that sounds right." We know about bias and about the subjectivity of our results. We know test reliability and accuracy. There is a profound concern for intellectual integrity that undergirds the field.
My claim is that these facts are evident to anyone who knows about the field. I could be wrong about any of those statements. I could be wrong that you know little about psychology. I am willing to entertain any questions about any specific areas you want to talk about. However, like I mentioned, the primacy of intellectual integrity has been drummed into my head. You are certainly free to make derrogatory claims about a field you know little about. In the eyes of an educated audience, I think that it helps demonstrate my point. However, I am certainly not obligated to take you seriously.
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quote:MrSquicky said: If you read my statements directly after that part you quoted, you'll notice that I focused on the impossibility of reality testing religious beliefs. Because there is no standard of proof that we can refer to as to the "rightness" of religious beliefs, it's harder to check the immature impulses that often get bound up in them.
I gave empirical examples that contradicted your “assumption” from your first post. I read the statement after that. My point is that while theoretically your point about proof in religion may sound reasonable, it hasn’t held up to practice in this century. This is probably because the underlying doctrines of these mass murders were also not conducive to objective proof.
My underlying philosophy here is that NO moral code is subject to objectively physically verifiable proof. No amount of logical contortions can validly take you from “Such and such is a physically verifiable fact” to “People ought to do so and so.” I didn’t go into that because it seemed extraneous to the topic at hand.
quote:MrSquicky said: How do I put this nicely? You seem to be very quick to make dedinite pronouncements about a field that you don't seem to know much about. To me, your objections are boringly innaccurate. They are statements seemingly without any factual basis. By that I mean that you seem to know little about the field but make statements that are only justifiable if you did. Thus, I feel that your confidence is unwarrented.
I haven’t made “definite pronouncements.” I’ve very clearly used words like “doubtful” and “reservations.” I’ve also stated prima facie reasonable objections to the studies you’ve outlined. If they’re wrong, instead of calling them “boringly inaccurate” you could use this opportunity to educate some intelligent people outside your profession about certain aspects of it. You seem to have chosen to retreat to authority. “If you knew the truth you wouldn’t say that.”
quote:MrSquicky said: I will state once, very clearly for the record, that psychologists are not all immature, religion-hating, unscientific people whose only method of proof is "yeah, that sounds right." We know about bias and about the subjectivity of our results. We know test reliability and accuracy. There is a profound concern for intellectual integrity that undergirds the field.
I have never said that “all immature, religion-hating, unscientific people.” You have repeatedly taken statements in this thread well beyond their facial meanings. However, laypeople are under no compulsion to take your field’s word for its findings. I’m not talking about deliberate falsification or scientific fraud. Maybe this is just a bias from my chosen field of study, but conclusory statements are highly suspect. The reasoning and evidence undergirding the conclusion is what counts. Almost all of your posts about the state of study in this field are conclusory – e.g., quicker anchoring in autokinetic tests indicates a need for definiteness.
Given my admitted skepticism toward the field, I won’t take that at face value.
quote:MrSquicky said: You are certainly free to make derrogatory claims about a field you know little about. In the eyes of an educated audience, I think that it helps demonstrate my point. However, I am certainly not obligated to take you seriously.
I am free to use my not insubstantial reasoning abilities to evaluate the information from your field presented in a discussion forum. You are free to dismiss my evaluation, to simply list more information without relating it to the evaluation, to provide additional facts applicable to my evaluations, or to provide analysis that speaks to the evaluation.
Given your repeated “you don’t know enough to comment” statements, I have to ask again: “Why did you post this to a general discussion board?” If only psychologists are “qualified” to comment, why didn’t you go post this on a psychology board.
Did you post this to discuss? Or just to elicit comments you could ridicule and dismiss?
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Dagonee- why don't you just admit that psychology is too technical a field for you to ever truly grasp without earning an advanced degree? The whole reason that we have experts on any given subject is so that they can tell us what to think about a given subject which we cannot possibly comprehend.
Perhaps you should just take Squicky's word for it that the religious are on average more immature and hence more dangerous.
When the religious finally come to understand their delusion for what it is our society will finally be able to make some progress towards a true utopian society in which the wise and learned among us guide the ignorant to the fountain of light.
Honestly, I should have expected that people on a science fiction forum would understand this. Haven't any of you read the Lathe of Heaven? Ursula LeGuin understood what a perfect world could be provided if we trusted those who have the real truth.
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Jacare, you are speaking ironically, aren't you? Because I hope you aren't missing the irony in what you're saying.
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I can't swear to it, not having read the LeGuin book referenced, but I suspect that an active Mormon posting blatantly overblown blbost about religious people is, in fact, aware of the irony. Posts: 2762 | Registered: Sep 1999
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Heh, I like to keep 'em guessing every now and then. Of course, anyone who knows much about me won't be guessing for long as Lissande pointed out.
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Thanks Dagonee. I have been impressed with your posts in this thread. Old Squick usually has some good things worth saying, but he so often goes into "authoritarian" mode that having a discussion with him about his points is fairly difficult.
quote: Not knowing you at all...
I went into lurker mode some time before you showed up. I generally still tend to take a peek at the religion threads as well as some of the more eye-catching ones from time to time.
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