Prejudiced and unaware of it: Evidence for the Dunning-Kruger model in the domains of racism and sexism

K. West and A. A. Eaton
Personality and Individual Differences
Volume 146, 1 August 2019, Pages 111-119

Abstract

Prior research, and high-prolife contemporary examples, show that individuals tend to underestimate their own levels of bias. This underestimation is partially explained by motivational factors. However, (meta-) cognitive factors may also be involved. Conceptualising contemporary egalitarianism as type of skill or competence, this research proposed that egalitarianism should conform to the Dunning-Kruger model. That is, individuals should overestimate their own ability, and this overestimation should be strongest in the least competent individuals. Furthermore, training should improve metacognition and reduce this overestimation. Two studies on racism (N = 148), and sexism (N = 159) partially supported these hypotheses. In line with the Dunning-Kruger model, participants overestimated their levels of racial and gender-based egalitarianism, and this pattern was strongest among the most prejudiced participants. However, diversity training did not affect participants' overestimation of their egalitarianism. Implications for contemporary prejudice, and prejudice-reducing strategies are discussed.

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Conclusions

For many reasons, contemporary discussions of prejudice can be quite acrimonious. Members of socially advantaged groups may find such discussions difficult, unpleasant, or threatening Apfelbaum, Pauker, Ambady, Sommers, & Norton, 2008; Dover, Major, & Kaiser, 2016; Norton et al., 2006). Political divisions may lead members of both advantaged and disadvantaged groups to attribute overly negative motivations to the other group (Goff et al., 2014; Reeder, 2005; Taber, Brook, & Franklin, 2006). Motivation certainly forms an important part of the picture. However, this research suggests that, even if such motivational considerations were accounted for, there may be important cognitive hindrances to understanding and reducing prejudice that would have to be addressed. In line with the Dunning-Kruger model, this research found that very prejudiced individuals (i.e., those low in egalitarianism) may be genuinely unaware of their shortcomings because they lack the meta-cognition necessary to perceive them. It is thus possible that some solutions to contemporary prejudice may rely less on motivation and more on education.

The research is here.

Concealment of nonreligious identity: Exploring social identity threat among atheists and other nonreligious individuals

Mackey, C. D., Silver, and others
(2020). Group Processes & Intergroup Relations.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1368430220905661

Abstract

Negative attitudes toward the nonreligious persist in America. This may compel some nonreligious individuals to conceal their identity to manage feelings of social identity threat. In one correlational study and one experiment, we found evidence of social identity threat and concealment behavior among nonreligious Americans. Our first study showed that Southern nonreligious individuals reported higher levels of stigma consciousness and self-reported concealment of nonreligious identity, which in turn predicted lower likelihood of self-identifying as “atheist” in public settings than in private settings. Our second study successfully manipulated feelings of social identity threat by showing that atheists who read an article about negative stereotypes of their group subsequently exhibited higher concealment scores than did atheists who read one of two control articles. Implications for how nonreligious individuals negotiate social identity threat and future directions for nonreligion research are discussed.

Suicide Risk Increases Immediately After Gun Purchase

Psychiatric News Alert
Originally published 11 June 20

A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine expands on past research on the association between access to guns and suicide, finding that handgun ownership is associated with an elevated risk of suicide by firearm, particularly immediately after the gun is acquired.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, gun sales have sharply increased, an accompanying commentary pointed out. In March, Americans bought nearly two million guns, marking the second-highest monthly total since 1998, when the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) began publishing such data.

“How will the current surge of gun purchases affect firearm-related violence?” wrote Chana A. Sacks, M.D., M.P.H., and Stephen J. Bartels, M.D., in their commentary. “With an additional 2 million guns now in households across the country at a time of widespread unemployment, social isolation, and acute national stress that is unprecedented in our lifetime, we urgently need to find out.”

Lead author David M. Studdert, LL.B., Sc.D., of the Stanford Law School and School of Medicine and colleagues tracked firearm ownership and mortality over 12 years (2004-2016) among 26.3 million adults in California. They used the California Statewide Voter Registration Database to form the cohort, as the database updates its information on registered voters in the state every year.

The researchers then used the California Department of Justice’s Dealer Record of Sale for details on which cohort members acquired handguns and when. Additionally, the California Death Statistical Master Files provided records of all deaths reported during the study period.

The alert is here.

The dual evolutionary foundations of political ideology

S. Claessens, K. Fischer, and others
PsyArXiv
Originally published 18 June 19

Abstract

What determines our views on taxation and crime, healthcare and religion, welfare and gender roles? And why do opinions about these seemingly disparate aspects of our social lives coalesce the way they do? Research over the last 50 years has suggested that political attitudes and values around the globe are shaped by two ideological dimensions, often referred to as economic and social conservatism. However, it remains unclear why this ideological structure exists. Here, we highlight the striking concordance between these two dimensions of ideology and two key aspects of human sociality: cooperation and group conformity. Humans cooperate to a greater degree than our great ape relatives, paying personal costs to benefit others. Humans also conform to group-wide social norms and punish norm violators in interdependent, culturally marked groups. Together, these two shifts in sociality are posited to have driven the emergence of large-scale complex human societies. We argue that fitness trade-offs and behavioural plasticity have maintained strategic individual differences in both cooperation and group conformity, naturally giving rise to the two dimensions of political ideology. Supported by evidence from psychology, behavioural genetics, behavioural economics, and primatology, this evolutionary framework promises novel insight into the biological and cultural basis of political ideology.

The research is here.

Social norms and cultural diversity in the development of third-party punishment

B. R. House and others
Proceedings of The Royal Society
Biological Sciences, 28720192794 (2020)
http://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2019.2794

Abstract

Human cooperation is probably supported by our tendency to punish selfishness in others. Social norms play an important role in motivating third-party punishment (TPP), and also in explaining societal differences in prosocial behaviour. However, there has been little work directly linking social norms to the development of TPP across societies. In this study, we explored the impact of normative information on the development of TPP in 603 children aged 4–14, across six diverse societies. Children began to perform TPP during middle childhood, and the developmental trajectories of this behaviour were similar across societies. We also found that social norms began to influence the likelihood of performing TPP during middle childhood in some of these societies. Norms specifying the punishment of selfishness were generally more influential than norms specifying the punishment of prosocial behaviour. These findings support the view that TPP of selfishness is important in all societies, and its development is shaped by a shared psychology for responding to normative information. Yet, the results also highlight the important role that children's prior knowledge of local norms may play in explaining societal variation in the development of both TPP and prosociality.

From the Conclusion and Discussion Section

Children's bias towards punishing selfish third parties increased during middle childhood, and this developmental pattern is similar across societies. Middle childhood is also when children across diverse societies become more prosocial and more averse to advantageous inequity. This raises the possibility that prosociality, advantageous inequity aversion and TPP may be developmentally coupled. In each of these cases, individuals incur personal costs to produce fairer outcomes for others. One explanation for this is that children become more responsive to social norms during middle childhood, leading them to become more likely to conform to social norms. This is consistent with our finding that norm primes begin to shape behaviour during middle childhood (although TPP norm primes were not effective in all societies).

The research is here.

Rationalization is rational

Fiery Cushman
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 43, E28.
(2020)
doi:10.1017/S0140525X19001730

Abstract

Rationalization occurs when a person has performed an action and then concocts the beliefs and desires that would have made it rational. Then, people often adjust their own beliefs and desires to match the concocted ones. While many studies demonstrate rationalization, and a few theories describe its underlying cognitive mechanisms, we have little understanding of its function. Why is the mind designed to construct post hoc rationalizations of its behavior, and then to adopt them? This may accomplish an important task: transferring information between the different kinds of processes and representations that influence our behavior. Human decision making does not rely on a single process; it is influenced by reason, habit, instinct, norms, and so on. Several of these influences are not organized according to rational choice (i.e., computing and maximizing expected value). Rationalization extracts implicit information – true beliefs and useful desires – from the influence of these non-rational systems on behavior. This is a useful fiction – fiction, because it imputes reason to non-rational psychological processes; useful, because it can improve subsequent reasoning. More generally, rationalization belongs to the broader class of representational exchange mechanisms, which transfer information between many different kinds of psychological representations that guide our behavior. Representational exchange enables us to represent any information in the manner best suited to the particular tasks that require it, balancing accuracy, efficiency, and flexibility in thought. The theory of representational exchange reveals connections between rationalization and theory of mind, inverse reinforcement learning, thought experiments, and reflective equilibrium.

From the Conclusion

But human action is also shaped by non-rational forces. In these cases, any answer to the question Why did I do that? that invokes belief, desire, and reason is at best a useful fiction.  Whether or not we realize it, the question we are actually answering is: What facts would have made that worth doing? Like an amnesic government agent, we are trying to divine our programmer’s intent – to understand the nature of the world we inhabit and our purpose in it. In these cases, rationalization implements a kind of rational inference. Specifically, we infer an adaptive set of representations that guide subsequent reasoning, based on the behavioral prescriptions of non-rational systems. This inference is valid because reasoning, like non-rational processes, is ultimately designed to maximize biological fitness. It is akin to IRL as well as to Bayesian models of theory of mind, and thus it offers a new interpretation of the function of these processes.

The target article is here, along with expert commentary.

The science behind human irrationality just passed a huge test

Cathleen O’Grady
Ars Technica
Originally posted 22 May 20

Here are two excerpts:

People don’t approach things like loss and risk as purely rational agents. We weigh losses more heavily than gains. We feel like the difference between 1 percent and 2 percent is bigger than the difference between 50 percent and 51 percent. This observation of our irrationality is one of the most influential concepts in behavioral science: skyscrapers of research have been built on Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s foundational 1979 paper that first described the paradoxes of how people make decisions when faced with uncertainty.

So when researchers raised questions about the foundations of those skyscrapers, it caused alarm. A large team of researchers set out to check whether the results of Kahneman and Tversky’s crucial paper would replicate if the same experiment were conducted now.

Behavioral scientists can heave a sigh of relief: the original results held up, and robustly. With more than 4,000 participants in 19 countries, nearly every question in the original paper was answered the same way by people today as they were by their 1970s counterparts.

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Many of the results in the replication are more moderate than in the original paper. That’s a tendency that has been found in other replications and is probably best explained by the small samples in the original research. Getting accurate results (which often means less extreme results) needs big samples to get a proper read on how people in general behave. Smaller sample sizes were typical of the work at the time, and even today, it’s often hard to justify the effort of starting work on a new question with a huge sample size.

The info is here.

Personal Therapy and Self-Care in the Making of Psychologists

Jake S. Ziede & John C. Norcross (2020)
The Journal of Psychology
DOI: 10.1080/00223980.2020.1757596

Abstract

Psychologists are skilled in assessing, researching, and treating patients’ distress, but frequently experience difficulty in applying these talents to themselves. The authors offer 13 research-supported and theoretically neutral self-care strategies catered to psychologists and those in training: valuing the person of the psychologist, refocusing on the rewards, recognizing the hazards, minding the body, nurturing relationships, setting boundaries, restructuring cognitions, sustaining healthy escapes, maintaining mindfulness, creating a flourishing environment, cultivating spirituality and mission, fostering creativity and growth, and profiting from personal therapy. The latter deserves special emphasis in the making of health care psychologists. These strategies are recommended both during training and throughout the career span. Recommendations are offered for enhancing and publicizing systems of self-care throughout the profession.

The article is here.

The moral courage of the military in confronting the commander in chief

Robert Bruce Adolph
Tampa Bay Times
Originally posted 9 June 20

The president recently threatened to use our active duty military to “dominate” demonstrators nationwide, who are exercising their wholly legitimate right to assemble and be heard.

The distinguished former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis nailed it in his recent broadside published in The Atlantic that took aim at our current commander-in-chief. Mattis states, “When I joined the military, some 50 years ago … I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking the same oath would be ordered under any circumstances to violate the constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside.”

The current Secretary of Defense, Mike Esper, who now perhaps regrets being made into a photographic prop for the president, has come out publicly against using the active duty military to quell civil unrest in our cities; as has 89 high ranking former defense officials who stated that they were “alarmed” by the chief executive’s threat to use troops against our country’s citizens on U.S. soil. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, a former U.S. Army general and Republican Party member, has also taken aim at this presidency by stating that he will vote for Joe Biden in the next election.

The info is here.