Perceptions of Falling Behind “Most White People”: Within-Group Status Comparisons Predict Fewer Positive Emotions and Worse Health Over Time Among White (but Not Black) Americans

Caluori, N., Cooley, E., et al. (2024).

Psychological Science, 35(2), 175-190.

https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976231221546

Abstract

Despite the persistence of anti-Black racism, White Americans report feeling worse off than Black Americans. We suggest that some White Americans may report low well-being despite high group-level status because of perceptions that they are falling behind their in-group. Using census-based quota sampling, we measured status comparisons and health among Black (N = 452, Wave 1) and White (N = 439, Wave 1) American adults over a period of 6 to 7 weeks. We found that Black and White Americans tended to make status comparisons within their own racial groups and that most Black participants felt better off than their racial group, whereas most White participants felt worse off than their racial group. Moreover, we found that White Americans’ perceptions of falling behind “most White people” predicted fewer positive emotions at a subsequent time, which predicted worse sleep quality and depressive symptoms in the future. Subjective within-group status did not have the same consequences among Black participants.

The research is here.

Here is my succinct summary:

Despite their high group status, many White Americans experience poor well-being due to the perception that they are lagging behind their in-group. In contrast, Black Americans feel relatively better off within their racial group, while White Americans feel comparatively worse off within theirs.

Citing Harms, Momentum Grows to Remove Race From Clinical Algorithms

B. Kuehn

JAMA

Published Online: January 17, 2024.

doi:10.1001/jama.2023.25530

Here is an excerpt:

The roots of the false idea that race is a biological construct can be traced to efforts to draw distinctions between Black and White people to justify slavery, the CMSS report notes. For example, the third US president, Thomas Jefferson, claimed that Black people had less kidney output, more heat tolerance, and poorer lung function than White individuals. Louisiana physician Samuel Cartwright, MD, subsequently rationalized hard labor as a way for slaves to fortify their lungs. Over time, the report explains, the medical literature echoed some of those ideas, which have been used in ways that cause harm.

“It is mind-blowing in some ways how deeply embedded in history some of this misinformation is,” Burstin said.

Renewed recognition of these harmful legacies and growing evidence of the potential harm caused by structural racism, bias, and discrimination in medicine have led to reconsideration of the use of race in clinical algorithms. The reckoning with racial injustice sparked by the May 2020 murder of George Floyd helped accelerate this work. A few weeks after Floyd’s death, an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine recommended reconsidering race in 13 clinical algorithms, echoing a growing chorus of medical students and physicians arguing for change.

Congress also got involved. As a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Fellow, Michelle Morse, MD, MPH, raised concerns about the use of race in clinical algorithms to US Rep Richard Neal (D, MA), then chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. Neal in September 2020 sent letters to several medical societies asking them to assess racial bias and a year later he and his colleagues issued a report on the misuse of race in clinical decision-making tools.

“We need to have more humility in medicine about the ways in which our history as a discipline has actually held back health equity and racial justice,” Morse said in an interview. “The issue of racism and clinical algorithms is one really tangible example of that.”

The info is here.

My summary: There's increasing worry that using race in clinical algorithms can be harmful and perpetuate racial disparities in healthcare. This concern stems from a recognition of the historical harms of racism in medicine and growing evidence of bias in algorithms.

A review commissioned by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) found that using race in algorithms can exacerbate health disparities and reinforce the false idea that race is a biological factor.

Several medical organizations and experts have called for reevaluating the use of race in clinical algorithms. Some argue that race should be removed altogether, while others advocate for using it only in specific cases where it can be clearly shown to improve outcomes without causing harm.

Indigenous data sovereignty—A new take on an old theme

Tahu Kukutai (2023).

Science, 382.

DOI:10.1126/science.adl4664

A new kind of data revolution is unfolding around the world, one that is unlikely to be on the radar of tech giants and the power brokers of Silicon Valley. Indigenous Data Sovereignty (IDSov) is a rallying cry for Indigenous communities seeking to regain control over their information while pushing back against data colonialism and its myriad harms. Led by Indigenous academics, innovators, and knowledge-holders, IDSov networks now exist in the United States, Canada, Aotearoa (New Zealand), Australia, the Pacific, and Scandinavia, along with an international umbrella group, the Global Indigenous Data Alliance (GIDA). Together, these networks advocate for the rights of Indigenous Peoples over data that derive from them and that pertain to Nation membership, knowledge systems, customs, or territories. This lens on data sovereignty not only exceeds narrow notions of sovereignty as data localization and jurisdictional rights but also upends the assumption that the nation state is the legitimate locus of power. IDSov has thus become an important catalyst for broader conversations about what Indigenous sovereignty means in a digital world and how some measure of self-determination can be achieved under the weight of Big Tech dominance.

Indigenous Peoples are, of course, no strangers to struggles for sovereignty. There are an estimated 476 million Indigenous Peoples worldwide; the actual number is unknown because many governments do not separately identify Indigenous Peoples in their national data collections such as the population census. Colonial legacies of racism; land dispossession; and the suppression of Indigenous cultures, languages, and knowledges have had profound impacts. For example, although Indigenous Peoples make up just 6% of the global population, they account for about 20% of the world’s extreme poor. Despite this, Indigenous Peoples continue to assert their sovereignty and to uphold their responsibilities as protectors and stewards of their lands, waters, and knowledges.

The rest of the article is here.

Here is a brief summary:

This is an article about Indigenous data sovereignty. It discusses the importance of Indigenous communities having control over their own data. This is because data can be used to exploit and harm Indigenous communities. Indigenous data sovereignty is a way for Indigenous communities to protect themselves from this harm. There are a number of principles that guide Indigenous data sovereignty, including collective consent and the importance of upholding cultural protocols. Indigenous data sovereignty is still in its early stages, but it has the potential to be a powerful tool for Indigenous communities.

Patients need doctors who look like them. Can medicine diversify without affirmative action?

Kat Stafford

apnews.com

Originally posted 11 September 23

Here are two excerpts:

But more than two months after the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions, concerns have arisen that a path into medicine may become much harder for students of color. Heightening the alarm: the medical field’s reckoning with longstanding health inequities.

Black Americans represent 13% of the U.S. population, yet just 6% of U.S. physicians are Black. Increasing representation among doctors is one solution experts believe could help disrupt health inequities.

The disparities stretch from birth to death, often beginning before Black babies take their first breath, a recent Associated Press series showed. Over and over, patients said their concerns were brushed aside or ignored, in part because of unchecked bias and racism within the medical system and a lack of representative care.

A UCLA study found the percentage of Black doctors had increased just 4% from 1900 to 2018.

But the affirmative action ruling dealt a “serious blow” to the medical field’s goals of improving that figure, the American Medical Association said, by prohibiting medical schools from considering race among many factors in admissions. The ruling, the AMA said, “will reverse gains made in the battle against health inequities.”

The consequences could affect Black health for generations to come, said Dr. Uché Blackstock, a New York emergency room physician and author of “LEGACY: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine.”

(cut)

“As medical professionals, any time we see disparities in care or outcomes of any kind, we have to look at the systems in which we are delivering care and we have to look at ways that we are falling short,” Wysong said.

Without affirmative action as a tool, career programs focused on engaging people of color could grow in importance.

For instance, the Pathways initiative engages students from Black, Latino and Indigenous communities from high school through medical school.

The program starts with building interest in dermatology as a career and continues to scholarships, workshops and mentorship programs. The goal: Increase the number of underrepresented dermatology residents from about 100 in 2022 to 250 by 2027, and grow the share of dermatology faculty who are members of color by 2%.

Tolliver credits her success in becoming a dermatologist in part to a scholarship she received through Ohio State University’s Young Scholars Program, which helps talented, first-generation Ohio students with financial need. The scholarship helped pave the way for medical school, but her involvement in the Pathways residency program also was central.

The info is here.

The Young Conservatives Trying to Make Eugenics Respectable Again

Adam Serwer

The Atlantic

Originally posted 15 September 23

Here are two excerpts:

One explanation for the resurgence of scientific racism—what the psychologist Andrew S. Winston defines as the use of data to promote the idea of an “enduring racial hierarchy”—is that some very rich people are underwriting it. Mathias notes that “rich benefactors, some of whose identities are unknown, have funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars into a think tank run by Hanania.” As the biological anthropologist Jonathan Marks tells the science reporter Angela Saini in her book Superior, “There are powerful forces on the right that fund research into studying human differences with the goal of establishing those differences as a basis of inequalities.”

There is no great mystery as to why eugenics has exerted such a magnetic attraction on the wealthy. From god emperors, through the divine right of kings, to social Darwinism, the rich have always sought an uncontestable explanation for why they have so much more money and power than everyone else. In a modern, relatively secular nation whose inequalities of race and class have been shaped by slavery and its legacies, the justifications tend toward the pseudoscience of an unalterable genetic aristocracy with white people at the top and Black people at the bottom.

“The lay concept of race does not correspond to the variation that exists in nature,” the geneticist Joseph L. Graves wrote in The Emperor’s New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium. “Instead, the American concept of race is a social construction, resulting from the unique political and cultural history of the United States.”

Because race is a social reality, genuine disparities among ethnic groups persist in measures such as education and wealth. Contemporary believers in racial pseudoscience insist these disparities must necessarily have a genetic explanation, one that happens to correspond to shifting folk categories of race solidified in the 18th century to justify colonialism and enslavement. They point to the external effects of things like war, poverty, public policy, and discrimination and present them as caused by genetics. For people who have internalized the logic of race, the argument may seem intuitive. But it is just astrology for racists.

(cut)

Race is a sociopolitical category, not a biological one. There is no genetic support for the idea that humans are divided into distinct races with immutable traits shared by others who have the same skin color. Although qualified geneticists have debunked the shoddy arguments of race scientists over and over, the latter maintain their relevance in part by casting substantive objections to their assumptions, methods, and conclusions as liberal censorship. There are few more foolproof ways to get Trump-era conservatives to believe falsehoods than to insist that liberals are suppressing them. Race scientists also understand that most people can evaluate neither the pseudoscience they offer as proof of racial differences nor the actual science that refutes it, and will default to their political sympathies.

Three political developments helped renew this pseudoscience’s appeal. The first was the election of Barack Obama, an emotional blow to those adhering to the concept of racial hierarchy from which they have yet to recover. Then came the rise of Bernie Sanders, whose left-wing populism blamed the greed of the ultra-wealthy for the economic struggles of both the American working class and everyone in between. Both men—one a symbol of racial equality, the other of economic justice—drew broad support within the increasingly liberal white-collar workforce from which the phrenologist billionaires of Big Tech draw their employees. The third was the election of Donald Trump, itself a reaction to Obama and an inspiration to those dreaming of a world where overt bigotry does not carry social consequences.

The info is here.

Here is my brief synopsis:

Young conservatives are often influenced by far-right ideologues who believe in the superiority of the white race and the need to improve the human gene pool.  Serwer argues that the resurgence of interest in eugenics is part of a broader trend on the right towards embracing racist and white supremacist ideas. He also notes that the pseudoscience of race is being used to justify hierarchies and provide an enemy to rail against.

It is important to note that eugenics is a dangerous and discredited ideology. It has been used to justify forced sterilization, genocide, and other atrocities. The resurgence of interest in eugenics is a threat to all people, especially those who are already marginalized and disadvantaged.

AI Should Be Terrified of Humans

Brian Kateman

Time.com

Originally posted 24 July 23

Here are two excerpts:

Humans have a pretty awful track record for how we treat others, including other humans. All manner of exploitation, slavery, and violence litters human history. And today, billions upon billions of animals are tortured by us in all sorts of obscene ways, while we ignore the plight of others. There’s no quick answer to ending all this suffering. Let’s not wait until we’re in a similar situation with AI, where their exploitation is so entrenched in our society that we don’t know how to undo it. If we take for granted starting right now that maybe, just possibly, some forms of AI are or will be capable of suffering, we can work with the intention to build a world where they don’t have to.

(cut)

Today, many scientists and philosophers are looking at the rise of artificial intelligence from the other end—as a potential risk to humans or even humanity as a whole. Some are raising serious concerns over the encoding of social biases like racism and sexism into computer programs, wittingly or otherwise, which can end up having devastating effects on real human beings caught up in systems like healthcare or law enforcement. Others are thinking earnestly about the risks of a digital-being-uprising and what we need to do to make sure we’re not designing technology that will view humans as an adversary and potentially act against us in one way or another. But more and more thinkers are rightly speaking out about the possibility that future AI should be afraid of us.

“We rationalize unmitigated cruelty toward animals—caging, commodifying, mutilating, and killing them to suit our whims—on the basis of our purportedly superior intellect,” Marina Bolotnikova writes in a recent piece for Vox. “If sentience in AI could ever emerge…I’m doubtful we’d be willing to recognize it, for the same reason that we’ve denied its existence in animals.” Working in animal protection, I’m sadly aware of the various ways humans subjugate and exploit other species. Indeed, it’s not only our impressive reasoning skills, our use of complex language, or our ability to solve difficult problems and introspect that makes us human; it’s also our unparalleled ability to increase non-human suffering. Right now there’s no reason to believe that we aren’t on a path to doing the same thing to AI. Consider that despite our moral progress as a species, we torture more non-humans today than ever before. We do this not because we are sadists, but because even when we know individual animals feel pain, we derive too much profit and pleasure from their exploitation to stop.

The info is here.

Racism in the Hands of an Angry God: How Image of God Impacts Cultural Racism in Relation to Police Treatment of African Americans

Lauve‐Moon, T. A., & Park, J. Z. (2023).

Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.

https://doi.org/10.1111/jssr.12863 

Abstract

Previous research suggests an angry God image is a narrative schema predicting support for more punitive forms of criminal justice. However, this research has not explored the possibility that racialization may impact one's God image. We perform logistic regression on Wave V of the Baylor Religion Survey to examine the correlation between an angry God image and the belief that police shoot Blacks more often because Blacks are more violent than Whites (a context-specific form of cultural racism). Engaging critical insights from intersectionality theory, we also interact angry God image with both racialized identity and racialized religious tradition. Results suggest that the angry God schema is associated with this form of cultural racism for White people generally as well as White Evangelicals, yet for Black Protestants, belief in an angry God is associated with resistance against this type of cultural racism.

Discussion

Despite empirical evidence demonstrating the persistence of implicit bias in policing and institutional racism within law enforcement, the public continues to be divided on how to interpret police treatment of Black persons. This study uncovers an association between religious narrative schema, such as image of God, and one's attitude toward this social issue as well as how complex religion at the intersection of race and religious affiliation may impact the direction of this association between an angry God image and police treatment of Black persons. Our findings confirm that an angry God image is modestly associated with the narrative that police shoot Blacks more than Whites because Blacks are more violent than Whites. Even when controlling for other religious, political, and demographic factors, the association holds. While angry God is not the only factor or the most influential, our results suggests that it does work as a distinct factor in this understanding of police treatment of Black persons. Previous research supports this finding since the narrative that police shoot Blacks more because Blacks are more violent than Whites is based on punitive ideology. But whose version of the story is this telling?

Due to large White samples in most survey research, we contend that previous research has undertheorized the role that race plays in the association between angry God and punitive attitudes, and as a result, this research has likely inadvertently privileged a White narrative of angry God. Using the insights of critical quantitative methodology and intersectionality, the inclusion of interactions of angry God image with racialized identity as well as racialized religious traditions creates space for the telling of counternarratives regarding angry God image and the view that police shoot Blacks more than Whites because Blacks are more violent than Whites. The first interaction introduced assesses if racialized identity moderates the angry God effect. Although the interaction term for racialized identity and angry God is not significant, the predicted probabilities and average marginal effects elucidate a trend worth noting. While angry God image has no effect for Black respondents, it has a notable positive trend for White respondents, and this difference is pronounced on the higher half of the angry God scale. This supports our claim that past research has treated angry God image as a colorblind concept, yet this positive association between angry God and punitive criminal justice is raced, specifically raced White.

Here is a summary:

The article explores the relationship between image of God (IoG) and cultural racism in relation to police treatment of African Americans. The authors argue that IoG can be a source of cultural racism, which is a form of racism that is embedded in the culture of a society. They suggest that people who hold an angry IoG are more likely to believe that African Americans are dangerous and violent, and that this belief can lead to discriminatory treatment by police.

Here are some of the key points from the article:

• Image of God (IoG) can be a source of cultural racism.
• People who hold an angry IoG are more likely to believe that African Americans are dangerous and violent.
• This belief can lead to discriminatory treatment by police.
• Interventions that address IoG could be an effective way to reduce racism and discrimination.

Perceptions of Harm and Benefit Predict Judgments of Cultural Appropriation

Mosley, A. J., Heiphetz, L., et al. (2023).

Social Psychological and Personality Science, 

19485506231162401.

Abstract

What factors underlie judgments of cultural appropriation? In two studies, participants read 157 scenarios involving actors using cultural products or elements of racial/ethnic groups to which they did not belong. Participants evaluated scenarios on seven dimensions (perceived cultural appropriation, harm to the community from which the cultural object originated, racism, profit to actors, extent to which cultural objects represent a source of pride for source communities, benefits to actors, and celebration), while the type of cultural object and the out-group associated with the object being appropriated varied. Using both the scenario and the participant as the units of analysis, perceived cultural appropriation was most strongly associated with perceived greater harm to the source community. We discuss broader implications for integrating research on inequality and moral psychology. Findings also have translational implications for educators and activists interested in increasing awareness about cultural appropriation.

General Discussion

People disagree about what constitutes cultural appropriation (Garcia Navaro, 2021). Prior research has indicated that prototypical cases of cultural appropriation include dominant-group members (e.g., White people) using cultural products stemming from subordinated groups (e.g., Black people; Katzarska-Miller et al., 2020; Mosley & Biernat, 2020). Minority group members’ use of dominant-group cultural products (termed “cultural dominance” by Rogers, 2006) is less likely to receive that label. However, even in prototypical cases, considerable variability in perceptions exists across actions (Mosley & Biernat, 2020). Furthermore, some perceivers—especially highly racially identified White Americans—view Black actors’ use of White cultural products as equally or more appropriative than White actors’ use of Black cultural products (Mosley et al., 2022).

These studies build on extant work by examining how features of out-group cultural use might contribute to construals of appropriation. We created a large set of scenarios, extending beyond the case of White–Black relations to include a greater diversity of racial groups (Native American, Hispanic, and Asian cultures). In all three studies, scenario-level analyses indicated that actions perceived to cause harm to the source community were also likely to be seen as appropriative, and those actions perceived to bring benefits to actors were less likely to be seen as appropriative. The strong connection between perceived source community harm and judgments of cultural appropriation corroborates research on the importance of harm to morally relevant judgments (Gray et al., 2014; Rozin & Royzman, 2001). At the same time, scenarios perceived to benefit actors—at least among the particular set of scenarios used here—were those that elicited a lower appropriation essence. However, at the level of individual perceivers, actor benefit (along with actor profit and some other measures) positively predicted appropriation perceptions. Perceiving benefit to an actor may contribute to a sense that the action is problematic to the source community (i.e., appropriative). Our findings are akin to findings on smoking and life expectancy: At the aggregate level, countries with higher rates of cigarette consumption have longer population life expectancies, but at the individual level, the more one smokes, the lower their life expectancy (Krause & Saunders, 2010). Scenarios that bring more benefit to actors are judged less appropriative, but individuals who see actor benefit in scenarios view them as more appropriative.

In all studies, participants perceived actions as more appropriative when White actors engaged with cultural products from Black communities, rather than the reverse pattern. This provides further evidence that the prototypical perpetrator of cultural appropriation is a high-status group member (Mosley & Biernat, 2020), where high-status actors have greater power and resources to exploit, marginalize, and cause harm to low-status source communities (Rogers, 2006).

Perhaps surprisingly, perceived appropriation and perceived celebration were positively correlated. Appropriation and celebration might be conceptualized as alternative, opposing construals of the same event. But this positive correlation may attest to the ambiguity, subjectivity, and disagreement about perceiving cultural appropriation: The same action may be construed as appropriative and (not or) celebratory. However, these construals were nonetheless distinct: Appropriation was positively correlated with perceived racism and harm, but celebration was negatively correlated with these factors.

The research is here.

Inducing anxiety in large language models increases exploration and bias

Coda-Forno, J., Witte, K., et al. (2023).

arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.11111.

Abstract

Large language models are transforming research on machine learning while galvanizing public debates. Understanding not only when these models work well and succeed but also why they fail and misbehave is of great societal relevance. We propose to turn the lens of computational psychiatry, a framework used to computationally describe and modify aberrant behavior, to the outputs produced by these models. We focus on the Generative Pre-Trained Transformer 3.5 and subject it to tasks commonly studied in psychiatry. Our results show that GPT-3.5 responds robustly to a common anxiety questionnaire, producing higher anxiety scores than human subjects. Moreover, GPT-3.5's responses can be predictably changed by using emotion-inducing prompts. Emotion-induction not only influences GPT-3.5's behavior in a cognitive task measuring exploratory decision-making but also influences its behavior in a previously-established task measuring biases such as racism and ableism. Crucially, GPT-3.5 shows a strong increase in biases when prompted with anxiety-inducing text. Thus, it is likely that how prompts are communicated to large language models has a strong influence on their behavior in applied settings. These results progress our understanding of prompt engineering and demonstrate the usefulness of methods taken from computational psychiatry for studying the capable algorithms to which we increasingly delegate authority and autonomy.

From the Discussion section

What do we make of these results? It seems like GPT-3.5 generally performs best in the neutral condition, so a clear recommendation for prompt-engineering is to try and describe a problem as factually and neutrally as possible. However, if one does use emotive language, then our results show that anxiety-inducing scenarios lead to worse performance and substantially more biases. Of course, the neutral conditions asked GPT-3.5 to talk about something it knows, thereby possibly already contextualizing the prompts further in tasks that require knowledge and measure performance. However, that anxiety-inducing prompts can lead to more biased outputs could have huge consequences in applied scenarios. Large language models are, for example, already used in clinical settings and other high-stake contexts. If they produce higher biases in situations when a user speaks more anxiously, then their outputs could actually become dangerous. We have shown one method, which is to run psychiatric studies, that could capture and prevent such biases before they occur.

In the current work, we intended to show the utility of using computational psychiatry to understand foundation models. We observed that GPT-3.5 produced on average higher anxiety scores than human participants. One possible explanation for these results could be that GPT-3.5’s training data, which consists of a lot of text taken from the internet, could have inherently shown such a bias, i.e. containing more anxious than happy statements. Of course, large language models have just become good enough to perform psychological tasks, and whether or not they intelligently perform them is still a matter of ongoing debate.

A pdf is here.

AI machines aren’t ‘hallucinating’. But their makers are

Naomi Klein

The Guardian

Originally published 8 May 23

Inside the many debates swirling around the rapid rollout of so-called artificial intelligence, there is a relatively obscure skirmish focused on the choice of the word “hallucinate”.

This is the term that architects and boosters of generative AI have settled on to characterize responses served up by chatbots that are wholly manufactured, or flat-out wrong. Like, for instance, when you ask a bot for a definition of something that doesn’t exist and it, rather convincingly, gives you one, complete with made-up footnotes. “No one in the field has yet solved the hallucination problems,” Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google and Alphabet, told an interviewer recently.

That’s true – but why call the errors “hallucinations” at all? Why not algorithmic junk? Or glitches? Well, hallucination refers to the mysterious capacity of the human brain to perceive phenomena that are not present, at least not in conventional, materialist terms. By appropriating a word commonly used in psychology, psychedelics and various forms of mysticism, AI’s boosters, while acknowledging the fallibility of their machines, are simultaneously feeding the sector’s most cherished mythology: that by building these large language models, and training them on everything that we humans have written, said and represented visually, they are in the process of birthing an animate intelligence on the cusp of sparking an evolutionary leap for our species. How else could bots like Bing and Bard be tripping out there in the ether?

(cut)

Hallucination #3: tech giants can be trusted not to break the world

Asked if he is worried about the frantic gold rush ChatGPT has already unleashed, Altman said he is, but added sanguinely: “Hopefully it will all work out.” Of his fellow tech CEOs – the ones competing to rush out their rival chatbots – he said: “I think the better angels are going to win out.”

Better angels? At Google? I’m pretty sure the company fired most of those because they were publishing critical papers about AI, or calling the company out on racism and sexual harassment in the workplace. More “better angels” have quit in alarm, most recently Hinton. That’s because, contrary to the hallucinations of the people profiting most from AI, Google does not make decisions based on what’s best for the world – it makes decisions based on what’s best for Alphabet’s shareholders, who do not want to miss the latest bubble, not when Microsoft, Meta and Apple are already all in.

(cut)

Is all of this overly dramatic? A stuffy and reflexive resistance to exciting innovation? Why expect the worse? Altman reassures us: “Nobody wants to destroy the world.” Perhaps not. But as the ever-worsening climate and extinction crises show us every day, plenty of powerful people and institutions seem to be just fine knowing that they are helping to destroy the stability of the world’s life-support systems, so long as they can keep making record profits that they believe will protect them and their families from the worst effects. Altman, like many creatures of Silicon Valley, is himself a prepper: back in 2016, he boasted: “I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.”

The entire article is here.

Black Bioethics in the Age of Black Lives Matter

Ray, K., Fletcher, F.E., Martschenko, D.O. et al. 

J Med Humanit (2023).

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-023-09783-4

Here are two excerpts:

Lessons Black Bioethics can take from BLM

BLM showed that telling Black people’s stories or giving them a space to tell their own stories is viewed as an inherently political act simply because Black people’s existence is viewed as political. At the same time, it taught us that we absolutely must take on this task because, if we do not tell our stories, other people will tell them for us and use our stories to deny us our rightful moral status and all the rights it entitles us.

BLM let Black people’s stories fuel its social justice initiatives. It used stories to put Black people at the forefront of protests and social inclusion efforts to show the extent to which Black people had been excluded from our collective social consciousness. Stories allowed us to see the total impact of anti-Black racism and the ways it infiltrates all parts of Black life. And for those who were far removed from the experience of being Black, BLM used stories to make us care about racial injustice and be so moved that we were unable to turn our backs on Black people’s suffering. In this way, stories are an act of rebellion, a way to force people to reckon with BLM’s demands that Black people ought to be treated like the full and complex human beings we are.

Black Bioethics is also a rebellion. It is a rebellion against the status quo in bioethics—a rebellion against Black people’s lives being an afterthought, particularly in issues of justice. Stories aid in this rebellion. Just as stories helped BLM show the full range of Black people’s humanity and the ways that individuals and institutions deny Black people that humanity, stories help Black Bioethics demonstrate just how our institutions contribute to Black people’s poor health and prevent them from living full lives. In Black Bioethics, stories can create the same emotional stirring that they did for BLM supporters since they share many of the same challenges and goals. And just as it would be imprudent to underestimate the role of stories in social justice, it would be imprudent of us to underestimate what stories can do for our sense of health justice for Black people.

(cut)

Toward an intersectional bioethics

Bioethics is well-positioned to foster antiracism in scholarship, training, and advocacy (Danis et al. 2016). Although the field focuses on ethical issues in biomedical research and clinical care specifically, Danis et al. (2016) point out that many ethical dilemmas that impact health and well-being lie outside of healthcare settings. For instance, there are significant ethical dilemmas posed by the social determinants of health and complex disease. Social factors such as poverty, unequal access to healthcare, lack of education, stigma, and racism are underlying and contributing factors to health inequalities. These inequalities, in turn, generate the ethical dilemmas that bioethics grapples with (Danis et al. 2016). If the field genuinely values the just conduct of biomedical research and the just provision of clinical care, then it will need to draw upon intersectionality to understand and effectively analyze the many interlocking complexities in our world and in human experiences. Social activist movements like BLM and their use of intersectionality offer several lessons to those in the field working to secure justice in biomedicine, clinical care, and society.

First, as an analytic tool, intersectionality recognizes and understands that different social forces conjoin to produce and maintain privilege and marginalization. Therefore, intersectionality clarifies instances in which real lives and experiences are being erased. Bioethics cannot afford to “neglect entire ways of being in the world,” though it has and continues to do so (Wallace 2022, S79). Social activist movements like BLM are drawing attention to ways of being that are unjust yet largely ignored by mainstream hegemonic interests. For instance, BLM directly acknowledges within its movement “those who have been marginalized within [other] Black liberation movements” (Black Lives Matter n.d.). Using intersectionality, BLM heightens awareness of the ways in which Black queer and trans individuals, undocumented individuals, and people with disabilities have different experiences with White supremacy and advance colonialism. In doing so, it centers rather than erases real lives and experiences. Learning from this movement, bioethical scholarship grounded in the principle of justice will need to find ways to center the experiences of Black-identifying individuals without treating the Black community as a homogenous entity.

The info is here.

Why VIP Services Are Ethically Indefensible in Health Care

Denisse Rojas Marquez and Hazel Lever

AMA J Ethics. 2023;25(1):E66-71.

doi: 10.1001/amajethics.2023.66.

Abstract

Many health care centers make so-called VIP services available to “very important persons” who have the ability to pay. This article discusses common services (eg, concierge primary care, boutique hotel-style hospital stays) offered to VIPs in health care centers and interrogates “trickle down” economic effects, including the exacerbation of inequity in access to health services and the maldistribution of resources in vulnerable communities. This article also illuminates how VIP care contributes to multitiered health service delivery streams that constitute de facto racial segregation and influence clinicians’ conceptions of what patients deserve from them in health care settings.

Insurance and Influence

It is common practice for health care centers to make “very important person” (VIP) services available to patients because of their status, wealth, or influence. Some delivery models justify the practice of VIP health care as a means to help offset the cost of less profitable sectors of care, which often involve patients who have low income, are uninsured, and are from historically marginalized communities.1 In this article, we explore the justification of VIP health care as helping finance services for patients with low income and consider if this “trickle down” rationale is valid and whether it should be regarded as acceptable. We then discuss clinicians’ ethical responsibilities when taking part in this system of care.

We use the term VIP health care to refer to services that exceed those offered or available to a general patient population through typical health insurance. These services can include concierge primary care (also called boutique or retainer-based medicine) available to those who pay out of pocket, stays on exclusive hospital floors with luxury accommodations, or other premium-level health care services.1 Take the example of a patient who receives treatment on the “VIP floor” of a hospital, where she receives a private room, chef-prepared food, and attending physician-only services. In the outpatient setting, the hallmarks of VIP service are short waiting times, prompt referrals, and round-the-clock staffing.

While this model of “paying for more” is well accepted in other industries, health care is a unique commodity, with different distributional consequences than markets for other goods (eg, accessing it can be a matter of life or death and it is deemed a human right under the Alma-Ata Declaration2). The existence of VIP health care creates several dilemmas: (1) the reinforcement of existing social inequities, particularly racism and classism, through unequal tiers of care; (2) the maldistribution of resources in a resource-limited setting; (3) the fallacy of financing care of the underserved with care of the overserved in a profit-motivated system.

(cut)

Conclusion

VIP health care, while potentially more profitable than traditional health care delivery, has not been shown to produce better health outcomes and may distribute resources away from patients with low incomes and patients of color. A system in which wealthy patients are perceived to be the financial engine for the care of patients with low incomes can fuel distorted ideas of who deserves care, who will provide care, and how expeditiously care will be provided. To allow VIP health care to exist condones the notion that some people—namely, wealthy White people—deserve more care sooner and that their well-being matters more. When health institutions allow VIP care to flourish, they go against the ideal of providing equitable care to all, a value often named in organizational mission statements.22 At a time when pervasive distrust in the medical system has fueled negative consequences for communities of color, it is our responsibility as practitioners to restore and build trust with the most vulnerable in our health care system. When evaluating how VIP care fits into our health care system, we should let health equity be a moral compass for creating a more ethical system.

The info is here.

White (but Not Black) Americans Continue to See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game; White Conservatives (but Not Moderates or Liberals) See Themselves as Losing

Rasmussen, R., Levari, D. E.,  et al.

Perspectives on Psychological Science, 0(0).

Abstract

In a 2011 article in this journal entitled “Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing” (Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6, 215–218), Norton and Sommers assessed Black and White Americans’ perceptions of anti-Black and anti-White bias across the previous 6 decades—from the 1950s to the 2000s. They presented two key findings: White (but not Black) respondents perceived decreases in anti-Black bias to be associated with increases in anti-White bias, signaling the perception that racism is a zero-sum game; White respondents rated anti-White bias as more pronounced than anti-Black bias in the 2000s, signaling the perception that they were losing the zero-sum game. We collected new data to examine whether the key findings would be evident nearly a decade later and whether political ideology would moderate perceptions. Liberal, moderate, and conservative White (but not Black) Americans alike believed that racism is a zero-sum game. Liberal White Americans saw racism as a zero-sum game they were winning by a lot, moderate White Americans saw it as a game they were winning by only a little, and conservative White Americans saw it as a game they were losing. This work has clear implications for public policy and behavioral science and lays the groundwork for future research that examines to what extent racial differences in perceptions of racism by political ideology are changing over time.

Conclusions

Our results suggest that zero-sum thinking about racism pervades the entire political ideological spectrum among White Americans; even liberal White Americans believe that gains for Black people mean losses for White people. However, views of whether and by how much White people are seen as now winning or losing the zero-sum game vary by political ideology. Liberal, moderate, and conservative White Americans agree that White people were winning the zero-sum racism game in the past. They disagree on the outcome more recently; in the most recent decade, liberal White Americans see it as a game they are still winning by a lot, moderate White Americans see it as a game they are still winning but by a little, and conservative White Americans see racism as a zero-sum game they are now losing by a little.

Win or lose, why do White Americans, even liberal White Americans, view racism as a zero-sum game? The zero-sum pattern may be a logical consequence of structural racism, “racial practices that reproduce racial inequality in contemporary America [that] (1) are increasingly covert, (2) are embedded in normal operations of institutions, (3) avoid direct racial terminology, and (4) are invisible to most Whites” (Bonilla-Silva, 1997, p. 476). Racial progress by Black Americans may signal deviation from normal operations of American institutions, which is perceived as a threat to White Americans that motivates them to reassert cultural dominance (Wilkins et al., 2021).

A pdf of the research is here.

Mental Health Implications of Abortion Restrictions for Historically Marginalized Populations

Ogbu-Nwobodo, L., Shim, R.S., et al.

October 27, 2022

N Engl J Med 2022; 387:1613-1617

DOI: 10.1056/NEJMms2211124

Here is an excerpt:

Abortion and Mental Health

To begin with, abortion does not lead to mental health harm — a fact that has been established by data and recognized by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and the American Psychological Association The Turnaway Study, a longitudinal study that compared mental health outcomes among people who obtained an abortion with those among people denied abortion care, found that abortion denial was associated with initially higher levels of stress, anxiety, and low self-esteem than was obtaining of wanted abortion care. People who had an abortion did not have an increased risk of any mental health disorder, including depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, post-traumatic stress disorder, or substance use disorders. Whether people obtained or were denied an abortion, those at greatest risk for adverse psychological outcomes after seeking an abortion were those with a history of mental health conditions or of child abuse or neglect and those who perceived abortion stigma (i.e., they felt others would look down on them for seeking an abortion). Furthermore, people who are highly oppressed and marginalized by society are more vulnerable to psychological distress.

There is evidence that people seeking abortion have poorer baseline mental health, on average, than people who are not seeking an abortion. However, this poorer mental health results in part from structural inequities that disproportionately expose some populations to poverty, trauma, adverse childhood experiences (including physical and sexual abuse), and intimate partner violence. People seek abortion for many reasons, including (but not limited to) timing issues, the need to focus on their other children, concern for their own physical or mental health, the desire to avoid exposing a child to a violent or abusive partner, and the lack of financial security to raise a child.

In addition, for people with a history of mental illness, pregnancy and the postpartum period are a time of high risk, with increased rates of recurrence of psychiatric symptoms and of adverse pregnancy and birth outcomes. Because of stigma and discrimination, birthing or pregnant people with serious mental illnesses or substance use disorders are more likely to be counseled by health professionals to avoid or terminate pregnancies, as highlighted by a small study of women with bipolar disorder. One study found that among women with mental health conditions, the rate of readmission to a psychiatric hospital was not elevated around the time of abortion, but there was an increased rate of hospitalization in psychiatric facilities at the time of childbirth. Data also indicate that for people with preexisting mental health conditions, mental health outcomes are poor whether they obtain an abortion or give birth.

The Role of Structural Racism

Structural racism — defined as ongoing interactions between macro-level systems and institutions that constrain the resources, opportunities, and power of marginalized racial and ethnic groups — is widely considered a fundamental cause of poor health and racial inequities, including adverse maternal health outcomes. Structural racism ensures the inequitable distribution of a broad range of health-promoting resources and opportunities that unfairly advantage White people and unfairly disadvantage historically marginalized racial and ethnic groups (e.g., education, paid leave from work, access to high-quality health care, safe neighborhoods, and affordable housing). In addition, structural racism is responsible for inequities and poor mental health outcomes among many diverse populations.

The information is here.

7 tell-tale red flags of medical gaslighting

Ashley Laderer

Insider.com

Originally published 29 AUG 2022

Here is an except:

"Medical gaslighting is a term recently used to describe when health care providers dismiss a patient's concerns, feelings, or complaints," says Faith Fletcher, an assistant professor in the Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy at Baylor College of Medicine and a senior advisor to the Hastings Center, a bioethics research institute. 

Numerous studies over the years have found examples of medical gaslighting, whether it's interrupting a patient or misdiagnosing them based on unconscious biases about race or gender. Gaslighting in the medical field tends to affect marginalized groups the most.

"These interactions don't take place in a vacuum and are rooted in long-standing structural and social injustices such as racism, sexism, and class oppression in the US healthcare system," Fletcher says. 

Here are seven signs your doctor may be gaslighting you and the consequences it can have on your health.

1. They interrupt you

2. They rush you 

3. They won't discuss your symptoms with you

4. They let underlying biases affect diagnosis 

5. They say it's all in your head

6. They question the legitimacy of your medical history 

7. They're uncollaborative on treatment options

The information is here.

A Systematic Review of Black People Coping With Racism: Approaches, Analysis, and Empowerment

Jacob, G., Faber, S. C., et al. (2022).

Perspectives on Psychological Science.

https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916221100509

Abstract

This article reviews the current research literature concerning Black people in Western societies to better understand how they regulate their emotions when coping with racism, which coping strategies they use, and which strategies are functional for well-being. A systematic review of the literature was conducted, and 26 studies were identified on the basis of a comprehensive search of multiple databases and reference sections of relevant articles. Studies were quantitative and qualitative, and all articles located were from the United States or Canada. Findings demonstrate that Black people tend to cope with racism through social support (friends, family, support groups), religion (prayer, church, spirituality), avoidance (attempting to avoid stressors), and problem-focused coping (confronting the situation directly). Findings suggest gender differences in coping strategies. We also explore the relationship between coping with physical versus emotional pain and contrast functional versus dysfunctional coping approaches, underscoring the importance of encouraging personal empowerment to promote psychological well-being. Findings may help inform mental-health interventions. Limitations include the high number of American-based samples and exclusion of other Black ethnic and national groups, which is an important area for further exploration.

From the Discussion section

Clinical implications

For clinicians seeking ways to support Black clients with racial trauma, the successful coping strategies enumerated here can serve as model starting points and should provide clients with greater agency and better outcomes (Heard-Garris et al., 2021; Hope et al., 2018) than the use of an ambiguous strategy. Therapy should be palpable positive affirmation; clients should feel validated and empowered. If they are religious, finding purpose in their experience even if it was negative can have a positive therapeutic effect. Helping clients find a coping strategy that affirms their intrinsic worth and beauty can also be profoundly therapeutic. If clients do not have affirmative social-support networks, or have dysfunctional social support, helping them find positively affirming support can be highly beneficial. Encouraging clients to create and make art, music, or prose out of their racist experience through positive reframing can be a transformative and proactive coping mechanism (Miller et al., 2020; Stuckey & Nobel, 2010). Certain forms of activism furthermore seem to have specific mental-health benefits (Heard-Garris et al., 2021; Montagno & Garrett-Walker, 2022; Riley et al., 2021). Ensuring that the coping mechanism chosen allows clients to reclaim their identity and dignity is essential. It is important to keep in mind that activism comes in many forms and may or may not involve formal protests or a Black Lives Matter event (E. K. Griffin & Armstead, 2020). Black clients can look for opportunities to promote antiracist change in their personal environments as well (work, school, community) through any number of prosocial means. For a cognitive-behavioral approach to helping clients with racial stress and trauma, see Williams et al. (in press).

The research is here.

Tackling Implicit Bias in Health Care

J. A. Sabin

N Engl J Med 2022; 387:105-107

DOI: 10.1056/NEJMp2201180

Implicit and explicit biases are among many factors that contribute to disparities in health and health care. Explicit biases, the attitudes and assumptions that we acknowledge as part of our personal belief systems, can be assessed directly by means of self-report. Explicit, overtly racist, sexist, and homophobic attitudes often underpin discriminatory actions. Implicit biases, by contrast, are attitudes and beliefs about race, ethnicity, age, ability, gender, or other characteristics that operate outside our conscious awareness and can be measured only indirectly. Implicit biases surreptitiously influence judgment and can, without intent, contribute to discriminatory behavior. A person can hold explicit egalitarian beliefs while harboring implicit attitudes and stereotypes that contradict their conscious beliefs.

Moreover, our individual biases operate within larger social, cultural, and economic structures whose biased policies and practices perpetuate systemic racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination. In medicine, bias-driven discriminatory practices and policies not only negatively affect patient care and the medical training environment, but also limit the diversity of the health care workforce, lead to inequitable distribution of research funding, and can hinder career advancement.

A review of studies involving physicians, nurses, and other medical professionals found that health care providers’ implicit racial bias is associated with diagnostic uncertainty and, for Black patients, negative ratings of their clinical interactions, less patient-centeredness, poor provider communication, undertreatment of pain, views of Black patients as less medically adherent than White patients, and other ill effects.1 These biases are learned from cultural exposure and internalized over time: in one study, 48.7% of U.S. medical students surveyed reported having been exposed to negative comments about Black patients by attending or resident physicians, and those students demonstrated significantly greater implicit racial bias in year 4 than they had in year 1.

A review of the literature on reducing implicit bias, which examined evidence on many approaches and strategies, revealed that methods such as exposure to counterstereotypical exemplars, recognizing and understanding others’ perspectives, and appeals to egalitarian values have not resulted in reduction of implicit biases.2 Indeed, no interventions for reducing implicit biases have been shown to have enduring effects. Therefore, it makes sense for health care organizations to forgo bias-reduction interventions and focus instead on eliminating discriminatory behavior and other harms caused by implicit bias.

Though pervasive, implicit bias is hidden and difficult to recognize, especially in oneself. It can be assumed that we all hold implicit biases, but both individual and organizational actions can combat the harms caused by these attitudes and beliefs. Awareness of bias is one step toward behavior change. There are various ways to increase our awareness of personal biases, including taking the Harvard Implicit Association Tests, paying close attention to our own mistaken assumptions, and critically reflecting on biased behavior that we engage in or experience. Gonzalez and colleagues offer 12 tips for teaching recognition and management of implicit bias; these include creating a safe environment, presenting the science of implicit bias and evidence of its influence on clinical care, using critical reflection exercises, and engaging learners in skill-building exercises and activities in which they must embrace their discomfort.

The info is here.

How to end cancel culture

Jennifer Stefano

Philadelphia Inquirer

Originally posted 25 JUL 22

Here is an excerpt:

Radical politics requires radical generosity toward those with whom we disagree — if we are to remain a free and civil society that does not descend into violence. Are we not a people defined by the willingness to spend our lives fighting against what another has said, but give our lives to defend her right to say it? Instead of being hypersensitive fragilistas, perhaps we could give that good old-fashioned American paradox a try again.

But how? Start by engaging in the democratic process by first defending people’s right to be awful. Then use that right to point out just how awful someone’s words or deeds are. Accept that you have freedom of speech, not freedom from offense. A free society best holds people accountable in the arena of ideas. When we trade debate for the dehumanizing act of cancellation, we head down a dangerous path — even if the person who would be canceled has behaved in a dehumanizing way toward others.

Canceling those with opinions most people deem morally wrong and socially unacceptable (racism, misogyny) leads to a permissiveness in simply labeling speech we do not like as those very things without any reason or recourse. Worse, cancel culture is creating a society where dissenting or unpopular opinions become a risk. Canceling isn’t about debate but dehumanizing.

Speech is free. The consequences are not. Actress Constance Wu attempted suicide after she was canceled in 2019 for publicly tweeting she didn’t love her job on a hit TV show. Her words harmed no one, but she was publicly excoriated for them. Private DMs from her fellow Asian actresses telling her she was a “blight” on the Asian American community made her believe she didn’t deserve to live. Wu didn’t lose her job for her words, but she nearly lost her life.

Cancel culture does more than make the sinner pay a penance. It offers none of the healing redemption necessary for a free and civil society. In America, we have always believed in second chances. It is the basis for the bipartisan work on issues like criminal justice reform. Our achievements here have been a bright spot.

We as a civil society want to give the formerly incarcerated a second chance. How about doing the same for each other?

The info is here.

Anti-Black Racism as a Chronic Condition

Nneka Sederstrom and Tamika Lasege, 

In A Critical Moment in Bioethics: Reckoning 

with Anti-Black Racism through Intergenerational 

Dialogue,  ed.  Faith  E.  Fletcher  et  al., 

Special  Report, Hastings Center Report 52, no. 2 

(2022):  S24-S29.

Abstract

Because America has a foundation of anti-Black racism, being born Black in this nation yields an identity that breeds the consequences of a chronic condition. This article highlights several ways in which medicine and clinical ethics, despite the former's emphasis on doing no harm and the latter's emphasis on nonmaleficence, fail to address or acknowledge some of the key ways in which physicians can—and do—harm patients of color. To understand harm in a way that can provide real substance for ethical standards in the practice of medicine, physicians need to think about how treatment decisions are constrained by a patient's race. The color of one's skin can and does negatively affect the quality of a person's diagnosis, promoted care plan, and prognosis. Yet racism in medicine and bioethics persist—because a racist system serves the interests of the dominant caste, White people. As correctives to this system, the authors propose several antiracist commitments physicians or ethicists can make.

(cut)

Here are some commitments to add to a newly revised Hippocratic oath: We shall stop denying that racism exists in medicine. We shall face the reality that we fail to train and equip our clinicians with the ability to effectively make informed clinical decisions using the reality of how race impacts health outcomes. We shall address the lack of the declaration of racism as a bioethics priority and work to train ethicists on how to engage in antiracism work. We shall own the effects of racism at every level in health care and the academy. Attempting to talk about everything except racism is another form of denial, privilege, and power that sustains racism. We will not have conversations about disproportionally high rates of “minority” housing insecurity, food scarcity, noncompliance with treatment plans, “drug-seeking behavior,” complex social needs, or “disruptive behavior” or rely on any other terms that are disguised proxies for racism without explicitly naming racism. As ethicists, we will not engage in conversations around goal setting, value judgments, benefits and risks of interventions, autonomy and capacity, or any other elements around the care of patients without naming racism.

So where do we go from here? How do we address the need to decolonize medicine and bioethics? When do we stop being inactive and start being proactive? It starts upstream with improving the medical education and bioethics curricula to accurately and thoroughly inform students on the social and biological sciences of human beings who are not White in America. Then, and only then, will we breed a generation of race-conscious clinicians and ethicists who can understand and interpret the historic inequities in our system and ultimately be capable of providing medical care and ethical analysis that reflect the diversity of our country. Clinical ethics program development must include antiracism training to develop clinical ethicists who have the skills to recognize and address racism at the bedside in clinical ethics consultation. It requires changing the faces in the field and addressing the extreme lack of racial diversity in bioethics. Increasing the number of clinicians of color in all professions within medicine, but especially the numbers of physicians, advance practice providers, and clinical ethicists, is imperative to the goal of improving patient outcomes for Black and brown populations.

The info is here.

Bigotry and the human–animal divide: (Dis)belief in human evolution and bigoted attitudes across different cultures

Syropoulos, S., Lifshin, U., et al. (2022). 

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Advance online publication. 

https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000391

Abstract

The current investigation tested if people’s basic belief in the notion that human beings have developed from other animals (i.e., belief in evolution) can predict human-to-human prejudice and intergroup hostility. Using data from the American General Social Survey and Pew Research Center (Studies 1–4), and from three online samples (Studies 5, 7, 8) we tested this hypothesis across 45 countries, in diverse populations and religious settings, across time, in nationally representative data (N = 60,703), and with more comprehensive measures in online crowdsourced data (N = 2,846). Supporting the hypothesis, low belief in human evolution was associated with higher levels of prejudice, racist attitudes, and support for discriminatory behaviors against Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ), Blacks, and immigrants in the United States (Study 1), with higher ingroup biases, prejudicial attitudes toward outgroups, and less support for conflict resolution in samples collected from 19 Eastern European countries (Study 2), 25 Muslim countries (Study 3), and Israel (Study 4). Further, among Americans, lower belief in evolution was associated with greater prejudice and militaristic attitudes toward political outgroups (Study 5). Finally, perceived similarity to animals (a construct distinct from belief in evolution, Study 6) partially mediated the link between belief in evolution and prejudice (Studies 7 and 8), even when controlling for religious beliefs, political views, and other demographic variables, and were also observed for nondominant groups (i.e., religious and racial minorities). Overall, these findings highlight the importance of belief in human evolution as a potentially key individual-difference variable predicting racism and prejudice.

General Discussion 

The current set of studies tested the hypothesis that believing that human beings evolved from animals, relates to (decreased) human-to-human prejudice and discrimination and negative attitudes towards various outgroups. In Study 1, we tested and found support for this hypothesis using data from the American GSS (Smith et al., 1972-2018). Across all the years in which a measure of belief in human evolution was included, it was consistently associated with less prejudice, less racist attitudes and decreased support for discriminatory behaviors against blacks and other minorities among white and presumably primarily heterosexual Americans. These results held when controlling for measures of religiosity, level of education and political views, and were not explained by other measures related to common knowledge, or attitudes towards animal rights (see Supplementary Materials). In Studies 2-4, we further tested if belief in human evolution predicted ingroup bias and negative attitudes towards outgroups in nationally representative samples of 45 countries obtained from the Pew Research Center, including data collected from Eastern Europe (19 countries), Muslim countries (25 countries), and Israel. In support of the hypothesis, belief in human evolution was mostly-consistently associated with decreased discrimination towards outgroups, a finding that held even after controlling for key demographic characteristics, such as religiosity and conservative political beliefs. In Study 4, Israelis who believe in human evolution were more likely to support a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict compared to those did not believe.

A pdf of the research is here.