DEI's "Psychology" Double-Bind

The NYT has an op-ed today regarding DEI programs -- and in particular, the scant research suggesting that they actually, you know, work.

I'm familiar with some of the research in this area and while I could quibble on the margins, the core point is more or less accurate. There is fairly robust research evidence that establishes implicit bias is prevalent in our society, but there is not much in the way of verifiably effective interventions that combat it. Many DEI programs which purport to address implicit bias and other forms of prejudice are at the very least not proven to actually have an impact on the problem they purport to address. Finding an intervention that reliably and durably alters discriminatory attitudes (particularly implicit ones) is somewhat of a white whale for the social psychology profession. But in the meantime, the lack of evidence that many DEI programs tailored towards altering attitudes are effective suggests that a ton of time and money is being wasted.

Given that, the article makes the following suggestions:

So what does work? Robert Livingston, a lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School who works as both a bias researcher and a diversity consultant, has a simple proposal: “Focus on actions and behaviors rather than hearts and minds.”

Dr. Livingston suggests that it’s more important to accurately diagnose an organization’s specific problems with D.E.I. and to come up with concrete strategies for solving them than it is to attempt to change the attitudes of individual employees. And D.E.I. challenges vary widely from organization to organization: Sometimes the problem has to do with the relationship between white and nonwhite employees, sometimes it has to do with the recruitment or retention of new employees and sometimes it has to do with disparate treatment of customers (think of Black patients prescribed less pain medication than white ones).

The legwork it takes to actually understand and solve these problems isn’t necessarily glamorous. If you want more Black and Latino people in management roles at your large company, that might require gathering data on what percentage of applicants come from these groups, interviewing current Black and Latino managers on whether there are climate issues that could be contributing to the problem and possibly beefing up recruitment efforts at, say, business schools with high percentages of Black and Latino graduates. Even solving this one problem — and it’s a fairly common one — could take hundreds of hours of labor.

I have no intrinsic quarrel with this. Instead of looking for "bad brains" and trying to fix them, focus on tangible actions and outcomes. If your company has too few Black and Latino people in management roles, instead of trying to root out the deep-seated biases in your executives and HR staffers, just get to work directly on the problem.

But this anti-psychology turn is interesting for one particular reason: it flies in the face of the prevailing conservative formulation of what discrimination is: namely, discrimination occurs if and only if one can prove the presence of malign intent by a discrete decisionmaker. Unless someone holds racially discriminatory attitudes, there cannot be said to be racial discrimination at all. From that framework, which holds out psychology as the exclusive prerequisite of discrimination, it makes sense that an anti-discrimination initiative would have to be psychologically-inclined as well. And indeed, focusing on actions and behaviors in absence of establishing bad psychological intent is an anathema to the conservative (and, often, alt-liberal) framework -- that way lies "racial balancing" or "equality of result" or any number of terrible ghouls which are supposedly the patrimony of the progressive DEI edifice.

And so we have a double-bind: first, prominent political and social institutions (to say nothing of legal precedents) say that the only cognizable way to speak of discrimination is through psychology -- bad motivations. Then, when DEI professionals accordingly work within that framework and try to address the problem through psychology, they're pilloried because such interventions, it turns out, are only dubiously reliable and don't directly correlate with fixing the "actual problem" of underrepresentation of social outgroups. Which is fine as far as it goes, except that when DEI tries to pivot back to the "actual problem" without the baggage of wading through conscious and subconscious attitudes, they're lambasted as crying "discrimination!" without proof, since only psychology is said to generate valid evidence of discrimination in the first place. It's an impossible situation. 

What Can "Objectively Reasonable" Do For You?

A new study (summarized here, published and paywalled version here) explores how the phrase "objectively reasonable" -- a very important phrase in the law surrounding assessments of police misconduct -- changes American perceptions of police officers. The core finding is that "objectively reasonable" makes listeners -- and particularly racial minorities -- think more favorably of the officer so labeled (compared to saying something like "the average police officer").

It's an interesting study, though my initial instinct is that the takeaway from it may be exactly opposite of what the authors imply. The authors suggest that the use of "objectively reasonable", since it is associated with more positive perceptions of the police, primes listeners (such as jury members) to think of the police more favorably than they otherwise would. But I think the effect may be the opposite: by asking jurors whether a given officer acting as an "objectively reasonable" officer would, the fact that "objectively reasonable" brings to mind higher levels of professionalism and conscientiousness means that the actual flesh-and-blood officer being judged is effectively being held to a higher standard than he or she otherwise would have.

Consider a jury deliberating over whether an officer accused of misconduct violated the legally-relevant standard of behavior. If that standard is that of the "average officer", the juror might think "well, their conduct wasn't great -- but then, the average officer isn't that great either. Can I really say that this guy performed worse than average?" But if "objectively reasonable" calls to mind more conscientious behavior, that same juror might conclude that the officer in front of the court did not meet that more idealized conception of how an officer should behave. So telling the jury that the officer they're evaluating must have acted as an "objectively reasonable" officer would cause them to more rigorously scrutinize the officer's conduct.

In other words: an officer whom we've already stipulated is "objectively reasonable" will be viewed more favorably than one who we only stipulate is "average". "Objectively reasonable" is better than "average" (at least for non-White respondents). But for that very reason, an officer whose performance we are trying to assess on a blank slate should be more likely to surpass the standard of "average" than the standard of "objectively reasonable", since the latter appears to be a higher bar than the former. So insofar as jurors are instructed to ask whether an officer behaved in a manner that comports with an "objectively reasonable officer", that should make them less likely to answer "yes" compared to if their standard was that of the "average" officer.

The Empathy Drought

2020 was a rough year for a lot of people -- an understatement if there ever was one. The pandemic has upended countless lives -- hundreds of thousands dead, many more seriously sickened or caring or grieving for those who are, countless lost jobs, terror at the prospect of losing one's home or one's retirement or one's livelihood. It's bad out there.

And while all that is going on, all the normal bad things that can happen to a person are still happening to lots and lots of people. People are going through bad breakups. People are losing their dream job, or are passed over for the promotion they worked their entire careers for. They're injured in accidents, they're discovering their partner cheated on them -- all this stuff is still happening.

These people are in a peculiar position. Under normal circumstances, they could assuredly say they're having a bad year. But in 2020, it often feels churlish to make such a claim. If they did, everyone would instantly assume it was bad because of something pandemic related -- a health scare, trouble managing quarantine, loss of a job, whatever. One can't easily correct that by saying "no, I'm having a bad year for reasons wholly unrelated to COVID." Our paradigm for "bad 2020" is centered entirely on the orbit of the coronavirus. There's scarcely any room left for badness outside that orbit to penetrate our consciousness.

I was talking with a student the other day who, it is fair to say, is having a rough term. She's a transfer student, which is difficult under any circumstances but especially when all learning is remote, and early this semester she got into a car accident. Her injuries weren't life-threatening, but they were serious enough to require ongoing care that's interfered with her ability to keep up with her classwork, and she's struggled to catch back up. Suffice to say, her first term at Berkeley has not gone the way she had hoped. But when we were talking about this, she rushed to say "I can't complain, I don't have the virus, my family is healthy, many have it much worse" -- to which I responded "well, you could complain a little." Circumstances like these are ones which entitle one to feel kind of down and to solicit the care and concern of others. But my student was hit with the one-two punch of an objectively terrible few weeks, and then the guilt of having the temerity to feel bad about having an objectively terrible few weeks.

There are all sorts of mundane bad events which normally would allow one to reach out to one's community and support network for empathy, compassion, and care -- even just of the pure "that sucks, I feel for you" variety. But right now, a lot of us feel like these resources are unavailable to us. We can't get them. This is the empathy drought. It is not, to be clear, a moral failing on anyone's part. It's a drought not because people are being stingy with their empathy. Much the opposite -- we're in a drought because the resource is overtaxed. We're using all of our emotional reserves to comfort those afflicted (in the broad sense) by COVID and its effects, and so we just don't have the energy to apply it to "ordinary" misfortunes.

It's an interesting position to be in, to be suffering from this drought. Because it is a form of suffering. It hurts to be going through these events, and then it hurts to lose access to comfort and care, and then it hurts to experience that burbling of resentment that the Coronavirus deprives one even of the soothing balm of communal empathy, and then it hurts to feel selfish enough to be resentful that one isn't receiving due comfort and care when so many are suffering so much worse.

I have no idea what to do about this. But it is a phenomenon I've observed, and one that I imagine is afflicting a lot of people who are hurting in "normal" ways right now.

I'm Sick of Smug-Takes on Berkeley Offering "Counseling"

Former Breitbart editor Ben Shapiro is coming to campus this week. Shapiro will be followed this month by Ann Coulter, Steve Bannon, and Milo Yiannopoulos, as part of a Berkeley "free speech week".

In a long email outlining the various campus policies that would be in place to facilitate all these speeches (and as I've consistently argued, having been invited by authorized community members they do have a right to speak free of censorship or material disruption, though of course not from non-intrusive protest or criticism), Executive Vice Chancellor Paul Alivisatos mentioned that, among other things, counseling services were available for any students who felt "threatened or harassed simply because of who they are or for what they believe."

And the internet went wild.

I don't need to collect links -- here's an example, but they're not hard to find. Across the entire political spectrum of the mainstream media -- you know, center-left to hard-right -- there was near-uniform glee in dumping on coddling Berkeley administrators and infantile Berkeley students who need counseling just because they're hearing "ideas they disagree with."

I cannot tell you how sick I am of hearing this. It's lazy, it's a cheap shot, it's intellectually incoherent, and above all it's mean-spirited. Berkeley isn't wrong here. And it's detractors are showing more about what's missing in their character than the most stereotypical Golden Bear hipster.

For starters, Berkeley is a big place. Its total enrollment is over 40,000 students. These young people come from a range of backgrounds, and at any given time across that 40,000 there will be persons who are struggling, or experiencing crises, or feeling threatened, or any other permutation of personal circumstance and emotional troubles you can imagine. I've already written recently about how all of us -- self-satisfied declarations notwithstanding -- intuitively understand how certain speech can truly wound deeply, in a manner which we can all empathize with. That doesn't mean we ban it (and offering counseling doesn't "ban" anything), but it does mean that there's a genuine phenomena that we can and should attempt to address

So let's be empathic. Let's imagine, amongst Berkeley's 40,000 students, that there is a student who is struggling. Maybe he's away from home for the first time and having difficulty adjusting. Maybe she feels in over her head in classes, finding that work that got her an A in high school is barely scraping a C at Berkeley. And then let's add more to it -- maybe he's just found out that he's now at imminent risk of deportation from the only country he's ever truly known. Maybe she's found out that, though she proudly served her country and is a veteran of the American armed forces, the President of the United States publicly declared her to be a burden on the US military who should never have been allowed to wear the uniform.

Now let's remember who Ben Shapiro is.

Ben Shapiro thinks that trans individuals suffer from a "mental illness" and gratuitously misgenders them for the primary purpose of causing offense. He refers to DACA as President Obama's "executive amnesty". Pretty much the only reason he isn't an avowed member of the alt-right is that they happen to hate him too. He's not an intellectual. He's not one the great thinkers of the right. His oeuvre, his raison d'etre, is to be a hurtful provocateur. That's what he brings to the table.

And let's be clear: this, the above, was why Ben Shapiro was invited to Berkeley. It wasn't because he offered "a different view." And it certainly wasn't because of the intellectual candlepower he has on offer. The people who invited Ben Shapiro to UC-Berkeley did so because of, not in spite of, the hurt he will dish out to already-vulnerable members of the community.

The students I outlined above -- already struggling, buffeted by political dynamics which very much are designed to dehumanize them -- now have to reckon with the reality that a non-negligible chunk of their colleagues are glad they're feeling that way. They actively want to accelerate the process. They'll go out of their way to invite speakers to reiterate and emphasize the point.

Honestly, I don't blame them if they could use a venue to talk out their feelings a bit. It strikes me as spectacularly uncharitable, a colossal failure of basic empathy, to think otherwise. Then again, what is our polity going through now but a colossal failure of basic empathy?

After the election, I made a similar comment (which I cannot find) when people again made fun of college kids who expressed deep hurt and fear upon the election of Donald Trump. This, too, was attributed to fragile millennial snowflakes who don't know how to tolerate hardship. And I remarked that the man now faced with being expelled from the country is not scared because he's frail, and the woman who was the victim of a sexual assault is not despondent because she's weak-willed. We've seemingly moved past "don't punch people who think you're subhuman" (okay) to "don't be sad that people think you're subhuman" (really?).

Some are arguing that the real problem with offering counseling is that it doesn't teach the kids "resilience". First of all, I wonder what they think goes on in counseling sessions -- my strong suspicion is that they are precisely about fostering resiliency so that students are better able to cope with such annoying trivialities like "I may be torn from the only home I've ever known at any moment and a sizeable portion of what I thought was my community will cheer as they drag me off." The objection here isn't so much to lack of resilience as to the university having the temerity to try and teach it -- like objecting to wilderness training because shouldn't real men already know how to survive outdoors?

Second, it is hard not to hear in this objection a deep resentment at the fact that today, even now, some people still do proactively care about the feelings of others. The argument seems to be that "fifty years ago if someone felt marginalized on a college campus nobody gave a shit. Today, some people -- including a few holding administrative positions -- do care, and for some reason that's a step backwards for society." One can hear more than a little of the typical mockery associated with using therapy of any sort -- though I admit I hadn't heard it manifest this overtly in some time -- which suggests that only persons of pathologically fragile mental composition could ever need something as lily-livered as counseling. Again, I find this argument hard to relate to, seeing as its genealogy is so thoroughly bound up in nothing more complicated than pure cruelty. Shorn of the feelings of superiority it generates, can anyone actually defend this?

Others complain that students shouldn't be going to therapy in response to such speech, they should be responding in other ways -- debate, protest, donations, activism, any thing else. Of all the objections, this is the one that is the most difficult to credit. Does anyone think that the only way Berkeley students will respond to Ben Shapiro's speech is by going to counseling sessions? That Friday morning, all 40,000 of us will march into whatever center houses our mental health professionals and demand to be soothed? Of course not. Of course there will be debate, and protest, and donations, and activism. And you can bet that however such actions manifest, people will still find a way to denounce the entire response tout court -- unjustified actions like violence, yes, but also silent protest, but also waving signs, but also pure condemnatory speech (especially if that speech dares use the dreaded -ism or -phobic suffixes).

Finally, let's dispense with the notion that this is all being triggered by students who can't tolerate "ideas they disagree with." For starters, it's notable that while Alivisatos' email does not in fact refer to any speakers in particular, everybody simultaneously assumed they were talking about Ben Shapiro while at the same time being aghast at how anyone could possibly need counseling after hearing Ben Shapiro. Me thinks they protest too much. But more to the point: Berkeley regularly hosts speakers who will present ideas many on campus will disagree with. This week, David Hirsh is giving a talk on "Contemporary Left Antisemitism" -- surely, many on campus would resist his conclusions. Later this term, National Review editor Reihan Salam will be speaking on immigration policy -- with no known objections or protests planned.

So the problem isn't ideas people disagree with. The problem is Ben Shapiro, and Ann Coulter, and Milo Yiannopoulos. One doesn't invite them to campus because they're presenting important ideas which need to be reckoned with. There are plenty of conservatives who fit the bill, and when those conservatives show up they are typically met with little fanfare. But if you're inviting this contingent, you're doing it because you like hurting people. That's their comparative advantage, that's the thing they can offer over and above all of their competitors.

It neither bothers me, nor surprises me, nor offends me, that this offends certain students. If some portion of those students are in an emotional place right now where they feel like they need counseling, I encourage them to get it. If others want to protest the speech, I support their right to do so within the parameters of the law. If still others want to attend the speech, or subject Shapiro to harsh questioning, or pen scathing op-eds in the Daily Cal, I applaud them all for it. And each of these options got pride of place in Alivistos' email.

All of these are valid responses. None of them are worthy of scorn, none of them signal any deficiency in our student body. What is far more worrisome is the reaction of the so-called "adults" in the media, who have grown so fond of bashing kids-these-days that they've seemingly forgotten the need to reason, much less to empathize.

One Eyed Blogger Roundup

Somehow, I scratched my left cornea pretty badly yesterday. Ever managed to get dehydrated simply by your eye tearing up? Now I have!

Anyway, good excuse to clear some stuff off the ol' browser tab:

* * *

Two great columns, one by Adam Serwer and the other by Josh Barro, on the growing conservative embrace of cowardly violence masquerading as toughness.

While we're on the subject, Michelle Goldberg explores the propensity to take angry White voters seriously precisely because they seriously threaten violence if they don't get their way. It might be interesting to tie in this claim to the concerns that at least some segments of the radical campus population do engage politically in this angry, threatening fashion.

Interesting Ha'aretz interview with Jamaica Kincaid -- just your standard-issue Jewish Afro-Caribbean writer residing in Vermont -- after she won Israel's prestigious Dan David Prize.

Buzzfeed profiles atheists living in highly religious societies. It's sobering just how many are in fear of their life.

Donna Minkowitz reflects on how it came to be that "proud self-hating Jew" Gilad Atzmon asked her to blurb his book.

Lauren Post has a piece at the Forward giving the history of antisemitism in the feminist movement. Some of the texts she links to are classics -- including a few I had been intending to read for awhile but hadn't gotten my hands upon.

My old Illinois colleague Suja Thomas in Jotwell reviews some new research on implicit bias and judging. And speaking of new research on implicit bias, remind me to get this book by Jonathan Kahn on the subject when it comes out next fall.

Finally, Heidi Kitrosser has an article in the Minnesota Law Review entitled "Free Speech, Higher Education, and the PC Narrative" which seems well worth reading. If ever there was a term being asked to carry far more weight than it is capable of bearing, it is "PC".

Last Call

At the end of November, I noted that one group which was really going to have it rough -- from a cognitive dissonance point of view, anyway -- over the next four years is that of Trump-critical conservatives. These are the guys who have some awareness of the outrageous danger that Donald Trump poses to our democratic system of governance, but really, really want to insist that this makes him no different from equally-dangerous-threat-to-the-republic Barack Obama. Having Obama to blame as the True Evil was the one thing that kept them sane. He was the one thing that kept them "conservatives". Donald Trump may be a problem, but Barack Obama!

It is for this reason that the last month or so of conservative commentary on Obama -- reaching its apex with the UN abstention vote on Israeli settlements -- has reached a fevered pitch. Like drunks who just heard "last call", conservatives are imbibing their favorite tonic with a desperate ferocity, knowing that it will soon disappear. In a month, right-wingers won't have Obama as their foil. They won't be able to wave their hands, throw up some pixie dust, and say "look over there!" They'll have to confront their demon face-to-face. Or -- perhaps more likely -- they'll have to bend the knee to it.

It is no accident that virtually the entirety of conservative response to Trump so far has been an extended riff on "I know you are but what am I?" Each and every sin Trump represents gets projected back onto the Democratic Party, the better to deny responsibility for what was happening in their own house. Harder and harder they clutch at denial: The mainstream media is the real feeder of fake news! Russia is the real force for good in the Middle East! Minorities are the real racists! Scientists are the ones really in denial on climate change!

The evolution of "fake news" is a great example. It is a problem when completely fabricated nonsense ("The Pope endorses Trump!") storms through social media. It undermines public trust and it shreds the informational fabric necessary for people to make informed decisions. But conservatives, desperate to insist that the problem isn't their own, are scrambling to apply the term to any liberal opinion they dislike. One might not agree with the assessment that the Iran Deal checked Iran's nuclear ambitions. One might have cogent arguments against it. But a story that reports that claim is not "fake news", it's a contrary evaluative appraisal. It doesn't fit, and it's embarrassing to see my conservative friends turn into the saddest of post-modernist parodies trying to make it fit. But the point of applying it isn't because it fits, it's to neutralize the terrible reality that there is a problem, and it is not in fact a symmetrical one.

So in all likelihood, other institutions (or the myth of Obama's "legacy") will take Obama's place as the conservative bugaboo which justifies their failure to hold their own movement to account. But nobody will fulfill that role better than Obama while in office. The conservative image of Barack Obama -- radical, terrorist-sympathizing, un-American, hyperpartisan, dictatorial, White-blaming -- was utterly divorced from reality. Indeed, it many ways it was what created Donald Trump. Tell your base that the opposition is radical, terrorist-sympathizing, un-American, hyperpartisan, dictatorial, and racist, and they will start believing you. And they'll do without your oh-so-subtle pseudo-intellectual pivot that seeks to ground it outside the fever swamp. Each time putatively reasonable conservatives engage in the myth, they further abdicate their responsibility to cure the disease ravaging their own political movement.

But there is a reason why the myth is so tempting. In its distortion it unified Republicans and quelled internal dissonance, albeit at a terrible cost. If Obama was this terrible, horrible, destructive, cataclysmic creature, then it wasn't really that terrible if Republicans created their own version of the "same". The constructed image of Obama warranted the failure of Republicans to confront their demons, because it allowed them to swallow every partisan's favorite intoxicant: The other side's worse.

Soon, Obama will be gone, and with him, the right's favorite palliative. But for one more month, they can still live in the idyllic harmony of the last eight years, where their actions had no consequences and their fantasies needed no foundations. I honestly can barely blame them for their carousing.

So drink up, my conservative friends. It's last call. In the morning, reality hits. And I hear its hangover's a bitch.

Things People Blame the Jews For, Volume XXXIII: Psychology

Dylann Roof, the White Supremacist terrorist who was just convicted of murdering nine at a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, now faces sentencing. He could receive the death penalty. One thing he will not do in his penalty phase is call a mental health expert or otherwise present mental health evidence. Why not? Glad you asked:

Roof, 22, who is acting as his own attorney during the penalty phase of the trial, said in a handwritten note to the court that he “will not be calling mental health experts or presenting mental health evidence.”

While the note did not specify the reason, his journal, filed with racist and anti-Semitic rants, which was introduced as evidence during the trial, says he considers psychology a “Jewish invention.”

“It is a Jewish invention and does nothing but invent diseases and tell people they have problems when they don’t,” Roof wrote, according to reports including from the Associated Press.

Actually, this one I feel like has a pretty long pedigree -- dating back to Freud. I suppose I hadn't realized it was still a "thing". But if the conspiracy means that Roof is more likely to receive the punishment he deserves, I suppose I can let him maintain his delusions idiosyncratic appraisal of social scientific development for a little while longer.

Pluralistic Ignorance: Gay Marriage, Racism, Israel, and Anti-Semitism

I vaguely remember the first time I thought about gay marriage as a political issue. I was either in middle school or early high school (so around the year 2000). As I recall it, my main thoughts on the matter were:

1. I couldn't think of any particular reason to oppose it; and
2. Supporting gay marriage was, descriptively, a fringe position that was outside the bounds of mainstream political discourse.

Being 14 years old or so, the second point was enough to at least keep me quiet on the matter. Who wants to be a non-serious outsider?

A few years later, of course, things had changed. Well before Obergefell, gay marriage crossed over into being at least a plausible political position -- one that people in my circle could openly avow without embarrassment or fears of being shunned or excluded. And once that happened, reason #1 was left alone and asserted itself without trouble. I never looked back.

I suspect that many people experienced an evolution like mine. Most people are reticent to radically break from their social neighbors -- not necessarily something to be proud of, to be sure, but descriptively accurate. And it's not simple bandwagoning -- the privately held position is genuine, but it just doesn't manifest until we are confident that expressing the position won't cause us to be expelled from our relevant social groups. Of course, the "relevant social group" would differ from person to person. The sorts of signals which demonstrate that a position is no longer fringe in legal academic circles, differ from those which provide the same message to judicial elites, versus to Democrats, versus to Mississippians. Nonetheless, I think a story of this sort accounts for the astonishingly rapid shift in attitudes about gay marriage over the course of only a few years. From 2001 to 2015, support for gay marriage gained a whopping 38 points (from net-negative 22% to net-positive 16%).

One way of formalizing the story I just told is through the lens of pluralistic ignorance. Pluralistic ignorance exists when people may personally reject a given social norm but sharply overestimate the degree to which their fellows support it. So I personally have no problem with gay marriage, but I assume all my neighbors do (and many of them, privately, are thinking the exact same thing). Since people frequently won't articulate opinions they believe are unpopular within their peer group, this can result in the maintenance of archaic social norms even when many people privately would be fine with abandoning them. It also explains why, under the right circumstances, these norms can disintegrate with astounding rapidity. If some peer members do articulate the supposedly taboo "dissident" opinion and nothing bad happens to them, then it opens the door for everyone else to articulate their own true views.

 The example I just used is a happy one -- people rapidly changing their minds to favor gay equality. But pluralistic ignorance does not always dam up progressive social reform. A few months ago, I told a story about racism and the Donald Trump campaign that moves to a very similar beat. I hypothesized that a significant swath of Americans had learned to cover up their racial prejudices under the belief that such views would be seen as unacceptable by their fellows. If they expressed them, they would be ostracized and shunned (perhaps by the ever-mythic "PC police"). And then Donald Trump came along and said all of the outrageous, biased, bigoted, racist things these covert racists had been yearning to yell out themselves.

...And nothing happened. Sure, the media fulminated and Trump's opponents cried foul. But it didn't sink Trump's campaign. If anything, it strengthened it. There certainly was no social banishment, no exile to the fringe corners of outcasts and misfits. Instead, the racists found that there were in fact plenty of people who believed the same things they did, that they held a non-trivial swath of public opinion and political power. And once they realized that, the dam broke. All that suppressed racial ressentiment came pouring out in full force and fury, shocking even conservative political pundits. The outlook which had been the joke, the province of fringe lunatics, suddenly was looking like the dominant force in one half of America's two-party system.

This pluralistic ignorance story may apply to views on Israel as well. CNN may have overstated things when it declared that "Bernie Sanders Smashed the Israel Status Quo" -- as J.J. Goldberg and Gershom Gorenberg, among others, has pointedly observed, Bernie lies well within a perfectly recognizable strand of contemporary Israel advocacy that has never been troubled by "criticism of Israel" -- but it was hardly entirely wrong either. In academia, the rise of BDS is perhaps a more clear demonstration of the effect. It's less about whether they win or lose, and more about signaling that positions on Israel hitherto regarding as extreme -- challenging its entire existence, declaring the entire Jewish national project to be a form of illicit domination -- are not in fact fringe ones. Anti-Israel activists like to tell a story about how marginalized and muzzled they are, but in many ways they're experiencing the exact opposite -- they can give their blood libel spiel, spout vicious anti-Semitic slurs, even falsify their data, and they'll still have a loud and raucous band of petition-signers ready to have their backs. Just like the formerly covert racist who attends the Trump rally and discovers that he was not, in fact, exiled to become a complete social outcast, the extreme anti-Israel activists have discovered that there is a place for them in mainstream discourse. And that means that all those who were privately outraged that Jews dared have a state to call their own but assumed such thoughts could not be expressed aloud, now have an accepted public outlet for their fury. Ressentiment rides again.

And what of outright anti-Semitism (which, of course, is distinct from hostile attitudes towards Israel but certainly often comes clothed in anti-Israel garb)? While it is standard-issue nowadays to claim that anti-Semitism is over, that Jews have officially won the anti-discrimination game (look at how well we poll!), there is a potential pluralistic ignorance story to be told here as well. If it is widely assumed that it's "not okay" to hate on the Jews, then most people will not admit to doing so. The question is -- what happens if that consensus is broken? If people express anti-Semitic attitudes, is it viewed as unacceptable? Does it shatter their reputation, the way it is so often assumed to do?

Right now, things stand on uncertain ground. A Stanford student leader says it is important to consider whether Jews really do control the banks and media -- but then again, the reaction by his peers was clear and unambiguous (yet, on the other other hand, will there be any reputation lost for the Stanford professor who wants people to get their news from blood libel advocates?). An Oberlin professor posts a slew of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and the university administration seemed barely able to muster up a response. But then a majority of Oberlin faculty did sign a letter denouncing them. But a significant minority of the faculty pointedly refused to do so, expressing "outrage[] at the irresponsible hostility drummed up against [Karega] as a scapegoated target." And round and round we go.

Pluralistic ignorance is by its nature a very speculative story to tell (at least projecting forward). And it depends on the peer groups one inhabits -- liberal college activist groups or conservative white nationalist communities are not every community (and it's worth noting that even in those communities pluralistic ignorance might manifest in its own way -- for example, progressive college students might feel compelled to sign on to far harsher condemnations of Israel than they personally feel are warranted because they jointly assume that is the norm position among progressive college students). But it is one reason I don't think one can rely on the stability of a "norm" against racism or anti-Semitism. It's possible it reflects genuine egalitarian commitments, free from misconceived notions about the attitudes of their peers. But it's possible it doesn't. And if not, the constructed edifice of respect and equality can all come tumbling down very, very quickly.

Two Types of Microaggressions and a Comment on Epistemic Injustice

My friend Regina Rini has penned an excellent column on microaggressions in the L.A. Times. I highly encourage you to read it. Inspired by her work, I wanted to write about two different kinds of microaggression which -- though not wholly separate -- are worth teasing apart. Consider two examples in the gender context:

(1) A female graduate student is constantly addressed by her male adviser through terms like "honey" or "sweetheart".

(2) A female graduate student feels constantly belittled and patronized by her male adviser. He always seems to talk down to her and does not view her as a worthy member of the intellectual community.

The first one is gendered on face, the second is not. This matters.

A skeptic of microaggressions, responding the former scenario, might concede that there is a gendered aspect to the comments but argue that any "offense" was probably unintended and in any event is marginal. "If this is the worst you're experiencing in terms of sexism," the argument goes, "count yourself lucky." This generally overlooks the pervasiveness of the statements. Pretty much everyone agrees that any singular instance of an activity termed a "microaggression" is not itself all that harmful. The problem is in the pattern: as Prof. Rini puts it "over time a pattern of microaggression can cause macro harm by continuously reminding members of marginalized groups of their precarious position." If someone made a weird joke about how my being left-handed marked me as the devil's servant, maybe I'd find it funny or maybe I wouldn't (depends on how good the joke was), but seeing as it would be the only time in the past decade someone had made reference to by leftiness in that way I'd probably shrug it off either way. If I lived in a different society where such "jokes" were routine and there were other broader barriers to lefty-equality and social sentiments promoting discrimination or exclusion of lefties, I'd feel different.

In any event, what matters in this case is that the cards are generally on the table. The operative question is how commonplace the slights are, and that is something the woman in question has directly experienced. I don't want to say there is no room for self-doubt -- we can still ask ourselves "is X number of gender-demeaning statements sufficient such that I am warranted to feel aggrieved" (contrary to popular belief, most women are not like Venus Fly Traps eagerly awaiting a stray call of "honey" to cross their path so they can experience the joy of crying victim). But most of the critical facts are pretty straightforward; indeed, I think it is fair to say that the microaggression critic here is in many cases simply unaware of the raw numbers and wrongfully views each microaggression in isolation.

Now consider the second scenario. Here the skeptic's response would be quite different, asking how we know that the professor's conduct relates to the student's gender? Maybe he's just a general asshole (hardly out of the question). Or maybe the student really isn't that bright (it happens, sometimes). Or maybe there is an other non-gendered factor causing his disdain. Moreover, it's not like male students don't also sometimes feel like their advisers don't respect them or speak to them as equals. Who's to say this instance is gendered?

Note that the problem here is in some ways the opposite of what is going on in the first case. Most people would agree that being derided and degraded by one's adviser (at least without good cause) is itself a pretty miserable experience -- even as a one-off. The dispute is over whether this wrong can be attributed to gender. By contrast, in the first set of microaggressions, the gendered component isn't really disputed, the argument is about whether the actions are pervasive enough so that one can characterize them as a wrong (or at least, a wrong not so trivial so as not to be worth talking about).

In a laboratory, answering the "how do we know" question also would generally be a matter of aggregation: when trying to unpack the roots of hostile conduct that could have both identity- and non-identity related causes, one thing we look for is the variance in how diverse groups are treated. If 75% of women in graduate programs are patronized but only 35% of men are, the evidence of sexism lies in the gap.

But people are not laboratories. Everybody knows, of course, that everybody sometimes receives bad treatment from their superiors. The woman in question may suspect, based on her experience, that it happens to her or her female peers more often than it does to men -- but this is a much more indirect and tenuous observation than would be the number of times she is called "sweetheart". Moreover, even under ideal laboratory settings the fact of the variance is evidence of discriminatory treatment existing, but it provides no hint as to which particular cases are and are not gendered (indeed, it strongly implies that some are not gendered). A woman trying to discern whether her particular experience derives from sexism or her own inadequacies or her adviser being a general jerk or something else will no doubt have to rely on much more subjective elements of her own judgment in making her evaluation.

This would all be tough enough if we respected the judgment of women when making these calls. But we don't, and this is where I think an epistemic injustice comes into play, and, more broadly, why I think the second class of microaggressions poses a particular peril. Epistemic injustice is probably the only reason why the first type of microaggression receives the doubt that it does ("Oh come on, you couldn't be cat-called that often. You're exaggerating!"), but it really rears its head with a vengeance in the latter case. The opinions of women or other marginalized groups -- in general but especially in this context -- are routinely dismissed as unreliable, self-centered, narcissistic, over-sensitive, or just plain nuts. In that world, a type of microaggression which can only be identified at the case-level by reference to subjective judgment is going to slam into the broader social belief that these judgments can't be relied upon. There isn't going to be a smoking gun in these cases, and the general rule is that without said gun marginalized persons are going to be ignored. And this message, trumpeted loud and clear, can knock one's own confidence in one's own appraisals of the surrounding world -- "am I just an over-sensitive whiner complaining about the same slings and arrows every person faces regardless of gender?" (Kate Abramson has a stellar paper exploring this topic through the lens of "gaslighting").

All of this leads to one more oddity I want to raise. Sometimes, I'll be engaging with a person or group that seems to me to be anti-Semitic, but hasn't said or done anything explicit yet -- my instincts are based on suspicions of differential treatment or lack of respect, but I can't outright falsify the possibility that Jewishness really has nothing to do with their positions. And then sometimes the person or group will say something that seems to tear the mask off -- positively quoting from Nazi propaganda or urging schools to expel Jews -- making the anti-Semitism clear and unambiguous. And even though this is a move to a more serious wrong on their part -- it converts a microaggression into a macro- one -- there is a part of me that often breathes a sigh of relief. There -- now that I have that smoking gun, people will believe me (I alluded to this issue in my Innocent until Proven Nazi post). And there is an even smaller part of me that breathes a sigh of relief and says See, you're not crazy after all. Even someone like me, who writes and talks constantly about the injustice of the default assumption that Jews and other minority groups either lie or are deluded when commenting on their own oppression, still has partially internalized the omnipresent social drumbeat that my instincts on anti-Semitism are systematically unreliable.

In short, there is a significant class of microaggressions which are genuinely ambiguous at the case-level. But the problem is not overzealous women, or Jews, or people of color, who seek to trample all over this ambiguity in a race to claim victimhood. What happens more often is that these people will perceive a problem, but be aware of the ambiguity, and know that they can't muster incontestable evidence to prove the problem, and are well aware that their subjective judgment on the matter won't be valued, and so are completely boxed off from any socially-sanctioned mechanism for talking about the perceived wrong or even fortifying their own epistemic self-regard. They are left in a limbo state, trapped with the nagging belief that maybe what everybody says about them is right, maybe they really are just making it all up. And that danger -- compounded by the fact that we lack socially-sanctioned mechanisms for talking about perceived wrongs in cases where there isn't smoking gun evidence -- is a real one and I think in many ways the most serious problem microaggressions pose.

Polarized Black Attitudes Towards Jews

Today I came across a short but very interesting study (unfortunately pay-walled) exploring the difference between White and black attitudes towards Jews. The thrust of it was that American Blacks are not more anti-Semitic than White people, they're just more polarized. Specifically, there are unique social threads pulling Black persons in both philo-Semitic directions (e.g., views of Jews as fellow victims or as liberal allies) and anti-Semitic directions (e.g., economic tensions or nationalistic scapegoating). The result is that while in the aggregate Black and White attitudes towards Jews are similar, Black views are more likely to be either strongly favorable or strongly unfavorable (whereas Whites tend to cluster in the middle).

The authors tested this along two dimensions: residential social distance (non-Jewish respondents asked if they would like to live in a neighborhood where the majority of residents were Jewish), and marital social distance (non-Jewish respondents asked if they would approve or disapprove of a close relative marrying a Jew). For both questions, Whites and Blacks in the aggregate had basically similar attitudes. But Black respondents were more likely to cluster at the poles (either strongly approving or strongly disapproving).

I've written several times on this blog against the notion that the Black community is particularly prone to anti-Semitism (which is not to say that there are no anti-Semitic Black people). This study, in addition to reinforcing that sentiment, also perhaps helps explain why some people seem to think that the Black community is particularly problematic in the respect. Sharp expressions of negativity probably stand out and stick in the mind more than strong positive feelings; hence, it is likely that in terms of recollection the two poles don't "wash out" and is more available than the other.

The study citation is David Raden, American Blacks' and Whites' Preferred Social Distance from Jews, 138 J. Soc. Psych. 265 (1998).

Motivated Reasoning: Social Mobility Edition

I've become more and more interested in the research on motivated cognition -- the processes by which we interpret evidence in a biased manner and reason directionally to our preferred ends. This literature is equal parts fascinating and depressing: fascinating as a window into our modes of thinking, depressing in that it has grim implications for both how much we should trust our learned intuitions and for the ability for evidence and facts to move our mental needles towards more accurate appraisals.

Today, I read an interesting study by John R. Chambers, Lawton K. Swan, and Martin Heesacker entitled Perceptions of U.S. Social Mobility Are Divided (and Distorted) Along Ideological Lines (forthcoming in Psychological Science). The study, as the name suggests, explores how people perceive facts relating to social mobility in the United States. They asked two main questions: First, they asked participants to provide their views on social mobility directly, by asking them to predict how many people who grew up in the bottom, middle, and top third of income brackets end up (as young adults) in the bottom/middle/top brackets (high social mobility would suggest that people move brackets regularly -- a society in which one's origins played no role in economic outcomes would see an even 33/33/33 split; low social mobility would suggest that people generally stay in the income bracket of their parents). Second, they asked people to appraise whether social mobility opportunities had increased or declined over time (they could say it increased a lot, a little, hadn't changed, decreased a little, or decreased a lot).

The results?

Everybody underestimated social mobility (that is, they thought our society was less socially mobile than it was). And likewise, people thought that we had experienced a decline in social mobility opportunities over the past few decades (in reality, social mobility rates have remained flat). But on both points, liberals were further from the mark than conservatives. The authors suggest that this is because liberals are generally pessimistic about the state of economic and social opportunity in America, and so they are motivated to belief that social mobility is worse than it is. Conservatives, by contrast, are more optimistic about America's meritocratic and egalitarian nature, and so (though they underestimated our social mobility too) ended up closer to the right figures.

I bring this up not because it means that social mobility is not a problem. After all, social mobility could simultaneously be more common than we thought and still too low, and indeed there are other western countries which dramatically out-perform America on this front. Rather, I mention these findings because, as the authors note, sometimes motivated cognition is perceived to be a conservative problem ("that's why they don't believe in global warming! They're just cognitively biased!"), and in reality it is a problem shared by all (I assume most of my readers are liberals and thus could use the reminder; conservatives preparing to gloat should know there are plenty of cases where the right is the party led astray). After all, if I'm being honest I can say I was surprised to find that most people underestimated social mobility (which is, of course, exactly what the study would predict would be my response). It's hard for me -- now knowing the data -- to say with confidence how I would have answered the study questions in my naive state, but I suspect at the very least I would have marked that social mobility was slightly worse off than it had been in decades past, and that would have been wrong. And the most likely explanation for its wrongness is that I have certain ideological priors that predispose me to having certain beliefs about the fairness of the American system.

Now, if one wanted to fight the data, there are ways to go about it. Perhaps while social mobility generally has remained unchanged (and is better than we thought), it might be the case that for particular subgroups (over-represented amongst liberals?), social mobility has decreased. There is some evidence pointing in that direction, and this could cause certain people to misperceive social mobility for the polity writ large based on the particular experience of their own group. Another possibility is that the abolishment of Jim Crow, and the resulting opportunities gains for racial minorities, had an upward-social mobility effect that canceled out other factors which generally reduced such mobility -- but that the former is perceived as a one-time "low-hanging fruit" situation while the latter are viewed as more permanent. But, these arguments are, as I said, fighting the data -- it seems likely that the general conclusion (that, for motivated ideological reasons, liberals underestimate the amount of social mobility in America) is accurate. And as a liberal, it's always worth remembering my own fallibility.

The First Roundup of 2015

A new year, a new roundup. For whatever reason, a bunch of really interesting articles popped up today, and I just don't have time to give them all the attention they deserve.

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Hadash (a joint Jewish-Arab party with Communist affiliations) has voted to join a unified Arab list, on the condition that the list include Jews and women (Hadash currently has four MKs, three Arab and one Jewish). Also of note is that former Israeli Knesset Speaker and Labor MK Avraham Burg appears to be considering a return to politics under Hadash's banner. He traveled to Hadash's conference on Shabbat because "because advancing solidarity between Jews and Arabs was 'a matter of life and death' that trumped the ban [on traveling during the Sabbath]."

A very good piece by Laurie Penny on the traumas faced by nerdy men growing up, and how they compare to those faced by nerdy women.

Brief reports to the contrary notwithstanding, Saudi Arabia denies that it will begin allowing Jews to work in the country. Israelis (and those with Israeli passport stamps) are barred from the country outright, Jews can (with some difficulty) obtain tourist visas.

The African Studies Association offers its first panel on African Jews (naturally, the first insight was that the term "African Jews" is too broad to do much useful work, but still).

Nothing too new for those in the know, but this short piece summarizing the empirical research on implicit racial bias may be useful for those looking for a quick-and-dirty introduction.

I am actually stunned by some of the findings in this poll of Israeli political attitudes. More Israeli Arabs have trust in their government than Israeli Jews (43% versus 37%). Strong majorities of both groups declare themselves to be proud to be Israeli (86% of Jews and 65% of Arabs). A bare majority of Israeli-Arabs say they trust the IDF (51%, the Israeli Supreme Court is the most trustworthy institution amongst Israeli Arabs at 60%).

A Black Rose

Vox reports on an interesting new study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology suggesting that people see "black" Americans as less competent than "African Americans". The study gave participants a fictional biography of a person variously described as "black" or "African American", and then asked them to predict qualities about the person. "African Americans" were generally given more positive attributes (higher incomes, more educational experience, etc.) than "blacks."

It's interesting to speculate on what's causing this gap. I recall reading that much of the push towards the label "African-Americans" was a belief that it would partially deracialize the group -- they were a distinct group, yes, but no more so than any other hyphenated American (Jewish-Americans, Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans). This study suggests that reasoning might have some legs to it. Alternatively, it might be that there are internal class divides within the community regarding their favored label -- wealthier or more educated persons favoring African-American, while their poorer peers preferring Black. But I have no idea if that's true.

Anyway, as the study authors emphasize, what is clear is that language matters. A rose given another name does not, in fact, always smell so sweet.

Cognitive Inequality and the Internet

Kevin Drum offers a theory that the internet drives increases of cognitive inequality. Put simply, "the internet makes dumb people dumber and smart people smarter." (the post was from 2012, but I came across it today). Basically, his point is that the internet makes available a massive glut of information -- accurate and inaccurate -- to the everyday population. If you know how to put in proper searches and have decent source-appraisal and critical-reasoning skills, you can become much, much smarter. If you lack these attributes, by contrast, you'll be a lot dumber.

This theory makes some sense to me, but I'm also interested in how it lines up with some of the motivated cognition research I've become increasingly interested in. An important part of that research is that we selectively interpret the information we receive -- and the information sources we pursue -- so that they are in harmony with our preexisting beliefs. So liberals avoid or discredit Fox, and conservatives do the same to MSNBC. And the thing is, it is very hard to disentangle that sort of motivated reasoning from critical appraisal. If I scroll over a link, see it's going to Breitbart, and say "pssh, obviously I don't need to read that tripe," am I wisely ignoring an incredible source, or am I avoiding information that might disrupt my carefully crafted belief structure? The answer is almost certainly some of each; but how much of each is difficult to determine. Indeed, how do I know that Breitbart lacks credibility? For the most part, it's because (a) a large quantity of sources within my epistemological network say it is and (b) from experience I know that their statements clash pretty consistently with my ideological priors. How is that different from motivated cognition? And we can run this in reverse, of course (witness the worries about "epistemic closure" on the right, or take it even further afield -- how do I know to dismiss conspiracy theories? I never landed on the moon; ultimately, I'm making a decision that NASA and like sources are more credible than expose-the-hoax.angelfire.com based on surprisingly thin gruel.

Ultimately, as depressing as Drum's hypothesis seems to be, I want to believe it is right because it indicates that education and knowledge can nudge us in the right direction of being better thinkers. But people are notoriously difficult to persuade, even when they're wrong. It is possible that the internet doesn't so much further cognitive inequality as it furthers cognitive divergence -- sending each of us down a personalized rabbit hole of groupthink and confirmation bias wherein every thought we think (right or wrong) can find a network of supporting architecture immunizing it from effective critique.

Moral Credentialing and Supreme Court Decisions

Noah Feldman has a Bloomberg column up provcatively titled "Obamacare May Die So Gay Marriage Survives". The idea behind it is that conservatives on the Supreme Court will -- unconsciously -- trade a "liberal" result in the seemingly-inevitable gay marriage appeal for a "conservative" vote in the latest Obamacare case. The basic idea is that by producing a high-profile liberal decision (in the gay marriage context), the conservatives can safely deliver a major conservative ruling without sacrificing its legitimacy, or the Justices' own conceptions of themselves as neutral arbiters whose decisions are governed by law rather than politics.

Dale Carpenter is not amused by this line of inquiry.

One can fully accept that political allegiances and the Supreme Court’s own desire to preserve the perception of its legitimacy, which is itself a form of politics, can influence its decisions. But Feldman’s approach calls on us to examine the deep and hidden psychological motivations of the Justices–which he agrees they would deny publicly and privately–without even considering whether there are perfectly reasonable and defensible legal grounds for the way they may rule in a particular case.

I am sympathetic to Carpenter's concerns. But I think some of them may be, if not dispelled, at least allayed if we look into the psychological literature which seems to underlie Feldman's argument (Feldman does not cite this literature, which probably doesn't help matters).

The phenomenon Feldman describes, to my eyes, seems most similar to the idea of "moral credentialing." I discuss this concept a bit in Sticky Slopes, but the basic idea is pretty simple: People have a strong self-conception of themselves as fair-minded and egalitarian; values which genuinely matter to them. But they also are motivated, often subconsciously, to act in unequal and unfair manners (e.g., racial or sexual favoritism). The first element often acts to check the second; when evaluating job applicants, for example, favoring a man over a woman would threaten the egalitarian self-concept. However, if a person has had the opportunity to demonstrate their egalitarian bona fides, that act provides a "credit" which allows them to engage in discrimination without threatening their self-image. Call it the "how can I be racist, I donate to inner-city charities!" effect. Having a salient egalitarian act one can point to makes it harder for observers (or the self) to infer that one makes biased decisions; paradoxically, this makes people more likely to indulge in precisely that sort of bias.

One can easily apply this same logic to judges, who have private "political" motivations regarding case outcomes that exist alongside a genuine commitment to fair and neutral arbitration that rejects the validity of relying on such preferences. For this reason, judges are undoubtedly quite sensitive when their legal rulings "just happen" to match their policy preferences -- it raises the specter that their decisions are actually motivated by politics rather than law. An easy way to dispel those fears is to point to another case which doesn't fit that mold. "If I were the sort of judge who voted on political grounds, how do you explain my vote in X v. Y?" Having this credit, the judge can effectively discount the possibility that he or she is influenced by such political concerns -- and accordingly will be less like to check against the subtle impact such desires have on his or her reasoning. I'll admit to having a similar suspicion regarding the latest health care case, albeit linked not to a gay marriage ruling but to Chief Justice Roberts' vote in the original Obamacare decision. That vote provides the Chief with a "credit" demonstrating that his votes on this subject are law-based rather than motivated by any antipathy to the Affordable Care Act or Obama administration. Consequently, it would be much harder to assert that a subsequent vote against the federal subsidies is motivated by bias -- after all; if he was the sort of judge that would be swayed by such concerns, why wouldn't he have simply struck down the law tout court?

Returning to Carpenter's objections, he complains that Feldman does not account for entirely legitimate, law-based reasons one might vote "conservative" in the health care case and "liberal" in the gay marriage cases. But moral credentialing, like all forms of motivated cognition, operates in the space of ambiguity -- it wouldn't work unless there were credible neutral reasons supporting one's (politically) preferred outcome. No moral credit of racial egalitarianism will enable one to justify hiring a drunk White high school dropout over a Black valedictorian. Rather, moral credentialing comes into play when there are facially legitimate reasons for a variety of different actions: a job opening sought by both a qualified White and Black candidate, for instance, where one could legitimately make a case for either. And so it is with law: whatever credit one receives for crossing "party lines" on a high-profile case -- demonstrating one's neutrality as a judge -- can conceptually only be redeemed in a case where reasonable minds might differ.

It is for this reason that Carpenter is partially correct regarding another one of his arguments -- that the psychological motivation forwarded here is "non-falsifiable." He's right, at least at the level of explaining individual cases. If the male and female candidates for a job are both equally qualified -- if there is a solid, credible case for either party -- non-prejudiced decisionmakers should still hire the man roughly half of the time. Any individual decision to hire a man may be entirely neutral and unaffected by the existence of a prior "credit." Where the effects of moral credentialing start to emerge is when we aggregate cases and see that the percentage of women hired plummets amongst actors who have in their possession a salient anti-sexism credential.

And this hypothesis probably could be put to the test with respect to judicial behavior. Are judges who break with their "side" in a high-profile case more likely to indulge in seemingly partisan or political voting in the aftermath? It seems that, measured across a large number of judicial decisions, this is a hypothesis that could be confirmed or falsified. Someone should get on that.

The Innocence of Youth

A very interesting study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology systematically overestimate the ages of children of color, particularly Black children, who are accused of crimes. The result is that they view them as less innocent and more culpable, and treat them more harshly.

Crime Control

Eugene Volokh comments on assault weapons bans which reference "pistol grips". The rationale for targeting such grips is that they make it easier to spray-fire while shooting from the hip. Volokh observes that spray-firing from the hip is far less accurate than aiming down one's sights, and therefore a criminal who fires in such a manner is less dangerous than one who does not.

In terms of what Volokh is "missing", I think it is that he is envisioning a different type of criminal than the enactors of the bill are. Volokh imagines a criminal who is specifically aiming to kill a particular person, in which case it is better for said criminal to be less accurate. When I think of spray-firing, though, I think of a criminal whose primary goal is to instill terror (as in a drive-by shooting, though I don't know how one fires a gun from a moving car). The primary objective is not to hit a particular target, and moreover to the extent there might be a specific target the shooter also probably doesn't care too much about collateral damage. As far as I'm concerned, I'm less frightened of a criminal trying to assassinate me specifically than I am about being in the wrong place at the wrong time when some thug is trying to "send a message" or whatever. I think there are fewer criminals interested in shooting me particularly than there are criminals who don't care who gets shot at all. Or to borrow from an old war saying: "Don't worry about the bullet with your name on it. Worry about the piece of shrapnel marked 'occupant.'"

In short, we target this grip because it seems most appealing to a particular type of criminal who is particularly unconcerned with human life. As Volokh notes, this may mean we are proportionately less concerned about criminals who are quite concerned about human life and are making a deliberate and conscious choice to end it. And this may even mean that we're not optimizing the number of murders we could be deterring, though this is less certain.

This, to me, is illustrative of a broader phenomenon: we want to control our criminals. Not just in the sense that we don't want them to commit crime -- though that too, of course -- but in that we want our crimes to occur in controlled, predictable, non-random manners. Far scarier than the aggregate statistics of being a crime victim is the prospect that being a crime victim might be entirely a manner of a caprice. Consider this interview with longtime defense attorney Sam Dalton:

Two men commit an armed robbery on the same night. The first man is a father of four. His family is about to be evicted. Or if you want to make him less sympathetic, let's say he's a drug addict who needs money to buy his next fix. He's nervous, he's sweaty. He's desperate, and he's panicky. He approaches his victim and roughly accosts him. He puts his gun to the victim's head. He's screaming profanities. He screams out for his victim's wallet, then screams louder and threatens the victim for moving too slowly. He takes his money and runs off. His victim is terribly frightened.

In the second scenario, our mugger is calm, cool, and methodical. He approaches his victim from the front, puts a light hand on the victim's back, and slowly and unemotionally explains that he has a gun in his coat pocket. He tells his victim that if he hands over his wallet, no one will get hurt, and they can both be on their way. The victim hands it over. The mugger walks off. The victim is angry at just having been robbed, but he isn't terrified. And he was never in real fear for his life.

Which of the two armed robbers is likely to get the longer sentence? Almost certainly the first one. Which of the two is the bigger threat to society? Unquestionably the second one. In fact, the second one is not only a likely career criminal, he's more likely to actually kill someone. The first one is scared because he knows he's doing something wrong. He feels some empathy for his victim. He's committing a crime of necessity. That isn't to say it excuses him. But his aggression comes from fear. The second mugger is incapable of empathy, or has learned to turn it off. He's cold-blooded.

So you see we impose punishment based on fear and a desire for retribution, not based on rational evaluations of what crimes and criminals are most dangerous.

This, I think, is a major motivator here. With the second mugger, or the "aim down the sights" criminal, we know the script. We know what we have to do to walk away (physically) unharmed. The first mugger, or the spray-from-the-hip gangbanger, doesn't allow us that luxury. It is scarier precisely because it is completely out of our control.

Does Dalton raise a good point that we should care more about harm than about what is scary? Sure. But it is not entirely unreasonable to target certain types of criminal activity -- and the devices that enable them -- because they make us feel more unsafe. After all, a large part of crime control isn't about actually playing the efficiency game and figuring out when the costs of crime control are justified based on tangible losses. A large part of it is based on creating the feeling of security and safety; so that stepping onto the street isn't itself a source of anxiety and panic. That's worthwhile in of itself. And where we can help create that feeling of safety at the minor cost of prohibiting a grip which, as Volokh's post observes, is apparently not particularly useful for legitimate social purposes -- that trade doesn't seem unwarranted.

The Importance of Being Earnest

There is a widespread consensus that the attorney who argued for the plaintiffs in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action (regarding the constitutionality of Michigan's anti-affirmative action constitutional amendment) did a poor job. The chatter about her performance is amplified because she was not originally scheduled to argue the case, instead substituting at the last minute. There's been a lot of speculation about why that happened, but Tony Mauro may have uncovered the answer:

Detroit civil rights lawyer Shanta Driver made a last-minute decision to argue in a high-profile Supreme Court affirmative action case on Oct. 15 in part, she said, because so few African-American lawyers appear before the justices.

Speaking at a rally of affirmative action supporters in front of the court after the argument, Driver said that only one black lawyer—who spoke for 11 minutes—appeared last term before the justices. It was important, she added, for her as a black woman to argue in Schuette v., Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action to show the justices that someone “who really could speak for the movement” was making the case to save affirmative action.

Her comments, which have gone unreported, help solve the mystery surrounding Driver’s surprise appearance before the court in one of its most important cases of the term. Until the morning of the Supreme Court arguments, Driver’s law firm partner George Washington, who is white, was listed by the court as the one who would make the case for state programs that give a boost to minorities.

Josh Blackman declares this to be "startling" and "patronizing to the Justices." But I'm not sure that's fair.

I should preface by saying that I don't have an opinion on whether the attorney's performance was in fact good or bad -- both because I haven't listened to the argument and, more importantly, because I agree with the also-generally-agreed-upon consensus that she was drawing dead to begin with. And we will never truly know whether the decision to swap in Driver would have made any difference. Counterfactuals are of course impossible and most people are skeptical that the quality of oral argument really impacts the Supreme Court's decisions, particularly in high-profile cases like this.

All that being said, I do want to make the simple observation that the way in which the race of an advocate or interlocutor affects the way we make decisions is an empirical and psychological one, and shouldn't be waved away on the grounds that it is "patronizing." There are many people affiliated with the Court in the early 90s who are convinced that the presence of Thurgood Marshall deterred his colleagues from being as aggressive as they would have liked in rolling back Warren Court race precedents, and that it made a significant difference when he was replaced by Justice Thomas. Driver seemed to think that it was important for liberal judges to see her, and perhaps her presence would impact how hard they'd dig in their heels in writing their dissent (or whether to dissent at all).

The point is that the impact on race in modern society is often framed in terms of politeness -- it's impolitic or rude to speculate that something like race might matter. But the impact of race on perception exists independently of how we would like polite society to operate, and we shouldn't be short-changing inquiry into the question by framing the entire question as ill-mannered.

The Only Thing We Have To Fear....

Kevin Drum links to an interesting study (summarized here; full-text is here for people who, unlike me, have access to these sorts of things) about why people listen to talk radio. The answer is it provides an affirming space where they can express their political opinions in a welcoming environment without fear of social sanction. And the reason conservative talk radio is so much more popular than its liberal counterpart is that conservatives are far more fearful of a particular type of social sanction: being called a racist.

In conversation with conservatives, liberals risk being called naïve or willfully blind to potential threats—not very pleasant labels, but not especially damaging ones, either. In contrast, conservatives risk accusations of racism—and “being called a racist carries a particular cultural force,” the researchers write.

“The experience of being perceived as racist loomed large in the mind of conservative fans (we interviewed),” they report. Every single conservative respondent raised the issue of being called racist, and did so without even being asked.

“What makes accusations of racism so upsetting for respondents is that racism is socially stigmatized, but also that they feel powerless to defend themselves once the specter is raised,” the researchers add. “We suspect that this heightened social risk increases the appeal of the safe political environs provided by outrage-based programs, and may partially explain the overwhelming conservative dominance of outrage-based political talk media.”

I think any White person at least feels a ping of recognition here. I didn't always have the views of race and racism that I do now, and I remember when I viewed the charge of "racism" in much the same way -- a bolt of lightening, wanton and capricious, impossible to predict, and terribly destructive. I try to remember that outlook because I remember who I was then: I wasn't some monster or Klansman in training, and (obviously) I was still in a position where I could eventually be persuaded to think more critically about the role of racism in contemporary American life.

That being said, one thing that I think often gets lost in these discussions is who is benefitted by viewing racism this way. Let's use Drum's discussion as an example:

It's obvious that race infuses a tremendous amount of American discourse. It affects our politics, our culture, and our history. Racial resentment is at the core of many common attitudes toward social welfare programs; our levels of taxation; and the current occupant of the White House. There's no way to write honestly about politics in America without acknowledging all this on a regular basis.

At the same time, it's also obvious that, in many ways, a liberal focus on race and racism is just flatly counterproductive. When I write about, say, the racial obsessions displayed by Fox News (or Drudge or Rush Limbaugh), it's little more than a plain recitation of obvious facts, and liberals applaud. Ditto for posts about the self-described racial attitudes of tea partiers. But conservatives see it as an attack. And why wouldn't they? I'm basically saying that these outlets are engaged in various levels of race-mongering, and by implication, that anyone who listens to them is condoning racism. That's such a uniquely toxic accusation that it makes any real conversation hopeless. Cognitively, the only way to respond is to deny everything, and that in turn forces you to believe that liberals are obviously just lying for their own partisan ends. This feeds the vicious media-dittohead circle, and everyone withdraws one step more.

Drum identifies a paradox: We have to talk about racism, but talking about racism renders conversation impossible. Racism is a "such a uniquely toxic accusation that it makes any real conversation hopeless."

But here's the thing: there's no reason why that has to be true. When we talk about homelessness, for example, and I argue that a particular political position is unfair to the homeless, it doesn't have this effect. Racism is different: to talk about racial justice at all is automatically translated into a personal attack on the target's moral character. And once that's the terrain of the discussion, we've insulated the underlying policy differences from critical review. All conversations about racism are converted into inquisitions into whether or not someone is a conscious bigot. Since they know they're nothing of the sort, the "accusation" is dismissed and the "accuser" is labeled a race-baiter. One may have noticed that even if one takes great pains to frame an argument such that it does not call anybody a racist, the stock response nevertheless will be "are you calling me a racist?!!?" Why are they so eager to make the debate about something so "toxic"? It's because that's actually very easy terrain to deal with.

Framing racism as a "toxic" accusation benefits the status quo racial hierarchy. Most obviously, it does so by insulating policies which have racial impacts from meaningful scrutiny. More subtly, it allows proponents of maintaining racial hierarchy to maintain their self-perception as anti-racist. This whole gambit depends on asserting the exceptional moral seriousness of racism (else how could it be so "toxic"?). One often hears the claim that a given charge of racism is spurious coupled with the assertion that such frivolous accusations "make it harder to oppose real racism" -- a reassertion of racism as something that is serious and does need to be opposed. The net result is that racism is so serious that nothing ever actually can be racist -- a neat equilibrium, for those who want to identify as non-racist but don't want to actually change anything about themselves.

For this reason, in Sticky Slopes I warn that ratcheting up the moral condemnation associated with "racism" isn't necessarily a good thing -- as we increase the seriousness of the norm, we decrease the range of behaviors people are willing to accept may be in violation of it. Racial liberals probably had a great role to play in giving "racism" its toxic reputation; but racial conservatives have powerful cognitive incentives to continue perceiving it this way.

Do Accusations of Racism Alter Expressed Racial Views?

This is an idea for a study I have, and I wanted to get it down on "paper" before I forgot about it and it went away.

Basically, the question is how telling somebody something is "racist" (or sexist, or anti-Semitic, or whatever) impacts their subsequent expressions on racial issues. This interests me, because (assuming that most Americans don't like thinking of themselves or being thought of as racist) one can imagine two very distinct response types.

One hypothesis is that people will moderate their previously held views, or otherwise act in a more minority-friendly manner following the charge. This theory flows somewhat out of (is kind of the reverse, actually) the idea of "moral credentialing". The moral credentialing literature establishes that when people act in a friendly manner towards an outgroup, they gain a "credit" which they can cash-in later to justify subsequent unfriendly acts without damaging their self-image as non-prejudiced. It would stand to reason that calling someone "racist" might create in their minds a moral "deficit", which they would then try to settle by engaging in subsequent friendly acts (so I'll call this the "deficit reduction" hypothesis).

Another hypothesis is that people will "double down" on these views, or otherwise act in a more minority-hostile manner following the charge (the "double down" hypothesis). Once again, we start from the premise that the charge of racism is disturbing to their self-image. But under this hypothesis, this results in either (a) a need to deny the charge and not take actions which seem to implicitly concede the charge is legitimate (which altering one's view might do) and/or (b) increased hostility towards the person rendering the charge, resulting in greater antipathy towards that group (this would presumably vary based on the identity of the person making the charge).

In my experience, I've seen both. Certainly, the premise behind the first hypothesis is pretty deeply inlaid in the entire structure of anti-racist practice: that "calling out" things as racist shames perpetrators and alters their behavior for the better. But the alternate hypothesis I've observed as well -- some people seem to respond even more aggressively when they feel like they are being called racist for taking certain positions. Some seem to revel in this -- they genuinely seem to enjoy "tweaking" their critics -- but for others it seems considerably more defensive and better explained by a desire to preserve their self-image as non-prejudiced.

I envision two separate experiments (the methodology is tentative -- I don't really know methodology). I also envision doing some survey work to help subdivide participants into, for example, "high-prejudice" and "low-prejudice" -- I gather this is something that is regularly done in these sorts of studies and there are established practices):

(1) A subject is asked to give their opinion on a racially-salient topic (say, affirmative action). When they are finished, a researcher tells them that they believe that what they said is racist (it doesn't matter what they actually said). Then they are taken to a different room, with a different researcher, and asked the same question. Their answers to the first and second questions will be coded to see if they become more extreme, less extreme, or stay the same.

(2) The study begins exactly the same way, with the researcher telling the person that they believe their response is racist. In the second part of the study, however, the participant will be given a non-political opportunity to render assistance to a minority in an ambiguous situation (or select between similarly-qualified minority and non-minority candidates for a mock job position).

We would thus be measuring the "double down" effect in two ways. The first study would be more directly political and is thus open to the possibility that the person strongly feels that their original position is pro-minority. The second study resolves that by removing the subjectivity in what decision is pro-minority. It relies on the well-established literature that prejudice manifests in situations of ambiguity.

I make two intersecting predictions. First, I predict that low-prejudice persons will generally be more inclined to engage in deficit-reduction, and high-prejudice persons will generally be more inclined to engage in doubling down. The non-racist self-image of the latter group is more precarious and thus more threatened by assertions of racism. Moreover, the hostility they feel towards the charge will reinforce their extant negative feelings towards the charger. Meanwhile low-prejudiced persons, because they are more secure in their egalitarian self-image, will paradoxically be more willing to contemplate that their views might need to be altered in response to critiques from minority perspectives.

Second, I predict you will see more doubling down across the board in the first experiment compared to the second. This plays off (but somewhat inverts) the observations of ambiguity. Altering one's views after being told one's prior views were racist relatively unambiguously communicates at least a partial concession that the charge was true and legitimate, which people will be reticent to admit. By contrast, the second study does not overtly communicate any message that the subject is recanting their prior beliefs, and thus allows for a restoration of a non-racist self-image without any implied concession that they were previously acting in a racist manner.