Psyche, Science, and Society

The dark side of close social connections

Psychologists and sociologists have found many positive effects from being socially connected. But a new line of reasoning suggests that social connection may have a dark side. It may contribute to an increased tendecy to dehumanize outsiders. This finding should not be especially surprising to those who have experienced the strengths and limits of close-knit social groups within a wider culture.

These possible negative consequences of social connectedness poses a conundrum. What conditions will allow us to accomplish both? Are trade-offs necessary?

Given these results it is, perhaps, not surprising that studies of altruists, like those who smuggled Jews out of Nazi-occupied Europe find that a degree of outsider status is common among them. Being an outsider apparently helps one identify with others who are outside the dominant group. Yet, in some instances, such as in Denmark and Holland, whole communities, or at lest major segments of those communities, participated in the rescuing of Jews, often at great risk. We need better understanding of what characteristics of those communities allowed them to resist the tendencies toward dehumanization of outsiders.

A Miller-McCune article summarizes the evidence for the dark side of social connectedness:

Strong Social Bonds Promote Health, Belonging — and Torture
New research finds people who feel a strong connection with their social group are more likely to dehumanize outsiders.

By Tom Jacobs

It was no surprise when a recent meta-study found people with strong social support networks tend to live longer, healthier lives. As the Mayo Clinic notes on its website, having close, lasting relationships strengthens one’s feelings of security, self-worth and sense of belonging.

But there appears to be a dark side to those life-enhancing bonds.Newly published research suggests they may make it more likely you’ll view those outside your social group as less than human —and treat them accordingly.

“Connecting with others brings individuals closer to each other, but moves them further from people from whom they are disconnected,” Adam Waytz of Northwestern University and Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago write in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. “The most tightly knit groups — from military units to athletic teams — may also be the most likely to treat their adversaries as subhuman animals.”

Waytz and Epley are scholars of dehumanization — the tendency for people to think of others as somehow less than fully human. It is at the root of racism (consider the well-documented tendency of many white people to think of blacks as ape-like), and it provides internally permission for both crimes (such as the taking of innocent lives during wartime) and misdemeanors (ignoring the homeless person sleeping on the sidewalk).

The researchers argue that “feeling socially connected to others may enable people to represent more distant others as subhuman.” Since their need for social contact has been satiated, such people are less motivated to consider the “interests, attitudes, feelings and preferences” of those outside the group — commonalities that reinforce our shared humanity.

“Being socially connected not only diminishes the motivation to connect with others, but may also diminish the perceived similarity with more distant others,” they add, “because social connections delineate those within one’s social circle and those outside of it.”

In other words, people tend to identify with their fellow group members, meaning they’re more likely to perceive outsiders as different. And asearlier research has shown, when people are viewed as dissimilar to ourselves, “they are evaluated as less humanlike as well.”

That may sound like a leap, but Waytz and Epley describe four experiments that back up their thesis. In one of them, 35 members of the University of Chicago community completed a “moral disengagement scale,” which included four statements indicating dehumanization. Specifically, they were asked their level of agreement with such propositions as “Some people deserve to be treated like animals.”

Before completing this survey, half of the participants were instructed to “think about going back home to attend a big family Thanksgiving dinner” and discuss the person at the gathering they feel closest to. The other half were told to “think about walking around Hyde Park to do some shopping” and describe shops and restaurants they patronize routinely.

Those who had contemplated someone close to them scored higher on dehumanization than those who had discussed their everyday shopping chores. “These results suggest social connection increases dehumanization specifically,” the researchers write.

If you consider the opinion “some people deserve to be treated like animals” too theoretical to be truly predictive of someone’s behavior, consider another of their experiments. Fifty-nine Chicagoans took part in what they were told was a study of attitudes. Half were instructed to attend with a friend, the others arrived alone.

“Those who arrived with a friend were assigned to the ‘connected’ condition,” the researchers write. They completed the experiment while sitting in a room with their friend (who could not see or influence them). The others were joined in the room by another test participant they didn’t know.

All were presented with 11 photos of men described as terrorists responsible for planning the 9/11 attacks. They then completed the aforementioned moral disengagement scale and answered a series of specific questions, including the degree to which they found acceptable such torture techniques as waterboarding and the application of electrical shocks.

Those who filled out the test with a friend in the room “dehumanized the detainees significantly more” than those who came alone, “and were also significantly more willing to endorse harming them,” Waytz and Epley report.

The researchers do not believe closeness to our own confederates means we automatically feel antipathy toward those outside our group. It’s just that we are more likely to think of them in abstract terms. Rather than individuals with specific needs and wants, they’re lazily lumped together as outsiders. This makes it easier to dehumanize them — and act accordingly.

“Being socially connected to close others has great benefits for one’s own physical and mental health,” the researchers conclude, “but it also satiates the motivation to connect with others.” With that urge satisfied, we’re prone to not give enough time or thought to those outside our social sphere to fully grasp their humanity. As this provocative research suggests, that can be a dangerous thing.

 

August 10th, 2011

Happy places have higher suicide rates

Being around happy people can be dangerous to your health if you are not happy. Or so a new study concludes. Replicating cross-national studies they found that suicide rates are highest in US states where people are happier. [A prepublication draft of the paper can be downloaded here.]:

Happiest Places Have Highest Suicide Rates, New Research Finds

The happiest countries and happiest U.S. states tend to have the highest suicide rates, according to research from the UK’s University of Warwick, Hamilton College in New York and the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

The new research paper titled “Dark Contrasts: The Paradox of High Rates of Suicide in Happy Places” has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. It uses U.S. and international data, which included first-time comparisons of a newly available random sample of 1.3 million Americans, and another on suicide decisions among an independent random sample of approximately 1 million Americans.

The research confirmed a little known and seemingly puzzling fact: many happy countries have unusually high rates of suicide. This observation has been made from time to time about individual nations, especially in the case of Denmark. This new research found that a range of nations — including: Canada, the United States, Iceland, Ireland and Switzerland, display relatively high happiness levels and yet also have high suicide rates. Nevertheless the researchers note that, because of variation in cultures and suicide-reporting conventions, such cross-country scatter plots are only suggestive. To confirm the relationship between levels of happiness and rates of suicide within a geographical area, the researchers turned to two very large data sets covering a single country, the United States.

The scientific advantage of comparing happiness and suicide rates across U.S. states is that cultural background, national institutions, language and religion are relatively constant across a single country. While still not absolutely perfect, as the States are not identical, comparing the different areas of the country gave a much more homogeneous population to examine rather than a global sample of nations.

Comparing U.S. states in this way produced the same result. States with people who are generally more satisfied with their lives tended to have higher suicide rates than those with lower average levels of life satisfaction. For example, the raw data showed that Utah is ranked first in life-satisfaction, but has the 9th highest suicide rate. Meanwhile, New York was ranked 45th in life satisfaction, yet had the lowest suicide rate in the country.

The researchers then also tried to make their comparison between States even fairer and yet more homogeneous by adjusting for clear population differences between the states including age, gender, race, education, income, marital status and employment status. Even with these adjustments. This still produced a very strong correlation between happiness levels and suicide rates although some states shifted their positions slightly. Hawaii then ranks second in adjusted average life satisfaction but has the fifth highest suicide rate in the country. At the other end of the spectrum, for example, New Jersey ranked near the bottom in adjusted life satisfaction (47th) and had one of the lowest adjusted suicide risks (coincidentally, also the 47th highest rate).

The researchers (Professor Andrew Oswald from the University of Warwick, Associate Professor of Economics Stephen Wu of Hamilton College and Mary C. Daly and Daniel Wilson both from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco) believe the key explanation that may explain this counterintuitive link between happiness and suicide rates draws on ideas about the way that human beings rely on relative comparisons between each other.

University of Warwick researcher Professor Andrew Oswald said: “Discontented people in a happy place may feel particularly harshly treated by life. Those dark contrasts may in turn increase the risk of suicide. If humans are subject to mood swings, the lows of life may thus be most tolerable in an environment in which other humans are unhappy.”

Professor Stephen Wu of Hamilton College said: “This result is consistent with other research that shows that people judge their well-being in comparison to others around them. These types of comparison effects have also been shown with regards

April 21st, 2011

Defend what you can’t escape from

US-them thinking is a major source of conflict in the world. The Boston Globe Ideas section brings news of a new study presenting a new wrinkle on the phenomenon:

Most of us probably assume that people who are trapped in repressive regimes like Cuba or North Korea really want to get out. A new study suggests instead that it’s the very fact of being trapped that helps people defend the system. When Canadians were led to believe that it would be harder to emigrate in the future, they became more willing to attribute social inequality to innate differences rather than systemic discrimination. Likewise, when university students were led to believe that it would be harder to transfer, they were less willing to support criticism of the university. So, just as people can go to great lengths to rationalize bad decisions and personal defects, they’ll stick up for the group they’re stuck with.

*******

Laurin, K. et al., “Restricted Emigration, System Inescapability, and Defense of the Status Quo: System-Justifying Consequences of Restricted Exit Opportunities,” Psychological Science (forthcoming).

August 1st, 2010

Eidelson: Psychology for Progressive Purposes

Roy Eidelson explains, in a Psychology Today blog post, how psychology can contribute to solving our manifold social problems:

Psychology for Progressive Purposes
Psychology has a crucial role in promoting progressive social change.

By Roy Eidelson

For today’s engaged citizens, there’s no shortage of pressing concerns that demand attention: social and economic inequality, inadequate access to health care, persecution and violence on the basis of belief or group identity, assaults on civil rights and personal dignity, and profound environmental threats to the planet itself.

As president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PsySR), I work with fellow members — psychologists and non-psychologists alike — in a shared venture to confront many of these challenges. A central premise of our efforts is that psychology — the science of human behavior — offers a strong base of knowledge and practice for developing and implementing policies that promote peace, social justice, human rights, and an ecologically sustainable future. We pursue these goals through research, education, intervention, and advocacy.

Real-world application of psychological principles can be a valuable resource for positive social change in a surprisingly wide range of contexts. Such knowledge can:

* Help individuals and groups overcome “us-versus-them” mindsets and build bridges across perceived divides.
* Encourage us to focus on our future collective welfare and to prioritize the broader long-term consequences of our actions instead of short-term self-interest by engaging our pro-social tendencies and moral sentiments.
* Strengthen our capacity to use thoughtful analysis and empathy when evaluating alternatives, and to resist appeals to fear and anger that are designed to cloud our judgment.
* Address misunderstandings and miscommunication, thereby serving to prevent the escalation of conflict and bloodshed; heal the wounds of violence, trauma, and neglect; and avert the transmission of revenge and despair from one generation to the next.

Making meaningful strides in areas like these will require deep understandings of how psychology and politics are inter-related, as well as increased collaboration between psychologists and other social scientists. In this way, psychological knowledge can be used more effectively to identify key features of stubborn social problems and to illuminate potential pathways to progress. Here are several examples.

Over one billion people struggle to survive on less than $1 a day. To reduce chronic poverty, we must confront the prejudices, discrimination, and societal arrangements that promote inequality and limit opportunity for so many. Psychology also highlights the need to reduce the stigma associated with being poor. And since we tend to be most supportive of others when their concerns relate to our own, anti-poverty campaigns are more effective when they communicate how poverty affects us all.

Nuclear weapons could destroy all life on Earth, a horror so great that we bury it from awareness. To eliminate these weapons, it’s important to understand the psychology that motivates us to acquire and retain them. Paradoxically, the desire for greater security spurs countries to want weapons of mass destruction. Overcoming a common attribution error — “our weapons are for protection, but theirs are for aggression” — is therefore crucial for parties to negotiate in good faith toward a nuclear weapons-free world.

Mass killing, torture, gender-based violence, and other human rights violations are a worldwide tragedy. Perpetrators are often driven by psychological factors, including vengeance, blind obedience to authority, the intoxicating effects of power, and the dehumanization and demonization of those who are different. We can counter these abuses by confronting the psychological barriers that too often discourage individuals or nations from intervening. These include fear, apathy, denial, perceived helplessness, and the diffusion of responsibility.

Climate change, population growth, and rising consumption represent a looming ecological catastrophe that imperils all human life. Psychology offers key insights to confront this crisis. Policies can be made more effective by addressing our tendency to focus on the short-term and to disregard critical dangers that grow over time. Another promising strategy involves helping wealthier nations examine how their excessive consumption interferes with the pursuit of important goals and values. The behavioral sciences are directly relevant to the challenges of bringing about large-scale social change.

Poverty, nuclear weapons, human rights violations, and climate change are global problems. But psychologically informed strategies have also proven successful when used in local initiatives. For instance, conflict management training for leaders in deeply-divided communities has curtailed sectarian violence. Intergroup contact and dialogue strategies have also been used effectively to reduce prejudice among participants in community youth programs. Carefully framed public service messages targeting HIV/AIDS prevention in under-served areas have led to sizable decreases in risky behavior. Correcting student misperceptions about the prevalence of heavy drinking has substantially reduced alcohol consumption on college campuses. Programs that provide comparative feedback on residents’ home energy consumption have lessened overall neighborhood energy use. And efforts to foster trust and a sense of shared identity have helped activists and advocacy organizations build broader and more effective coalitions.

But while psychology offers great promise in these spheres and many others, we must also recognize that there are those who regrettably misuse their understanding of human behavior for selfish or destructive purposes. In particular, political, media, and corporate elites at times engage in manipulation to promote everything from unhealthy lifestyles to greater inequality to war. The consequences are often tragic. The members of Psychologists for Social Responsibility believe that bringing greater psychological knowledge to the widest possible audience — policymakers, activists, educators, students, news media, and the general public — is crucial for empowering all of us to pursue socially responsible solutions to the many challenges we face today.

February 25th, 2010

Are video games liked for sense of control, not violence?

My son is always playing video games. Especially this, vacation, week. As parents, my wife and I don’t like how much he plays or the violence of his games. A new study described in Science News may provide some comfort for us:

Gamers crave control and competence, not carnage

Study turns belief commonly held by video game industry, gamers, on its head

By Laura Sanders

Blood, guts and gore aren’t what thrill avid gamers when they slaughter zombies in The House of the Dead III video game, a new study suggests. Instead, feelings of control and competence are what the players crave. The new research, led by psychologist Richard Ryan at the University of Rochester in New York, appears online January 16 in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

“A common belief held by many gamers and many in the video game industry — that violence is what makes a game fun — is strongly contradicted by these studies,” comments Craig Anderson, a psychologist who directs the Center for the Study of Violence at Iowa State University in Ames.

Many studies aim to determine how video game violence impacts players. Recently, lawmakers in the House of Representatives introduced a 2009 bill requiring violent video games to carry the following label: “WARNING: Excessive exposure to violent video games and other violent media has been linked to aggressive behavior.”

Some psychologists and lawmakers think the link between exposure to such violence and committing violent acts is well substantiated, but others, including Ryan, think the topic is “unfinished business.”

To figure out how enticing violence is for gamers, Ryan and colleagues conducted a series of survey-based studies to identify the reasons players enjoy a certain game. The results from two surveys, based on responses from over 2,500 people who participate in an Internet chat group focused on video games, found that the inclusion of violent content did nothing to enhance players’ enjoyment. What did matter was feeling in control and feeling competent. “Games give autonomy, the freedom to take lots of different directions and approaches,” says Ryan.

In a smaller experimental study, the researchers extensively modified a popular first-person shooter video game called Half-Life 2 to have less gore. Half the people in a group of 36 male and 65 female college students were instructed to dispatch adversaries as the original game intended, “in a thoroughly bloody manner,” says Ryan. The other half was instructed to tag enemies with a marker. “Instead of exploding in blood and dismemberment, they floated gently into the air and went back to base,” Ryan describes.

An extensive survey of the two groups showed that the exclusion of violence didn’t diminish players’ enjoyment of the game.

In a different study of avid gamers, a group of 39 males who were, on average, 19.5 years old and played video games for 7.5 hours a week were asked to play the game The House of the Dead III with a low violence or high violence setting. Instead of realistic wounds and gratuitous blood on slain enemies, the wounded were covered in neon green goo in the low-violence version of the game. As before, violence did not affect players’ enjoyment of the games.

Feelings of competence and autonomy are factors important to many different aspects of happiness, according to Ryan’s previously proposed “self-determination theory.” Bruce Bartholow, a psychologist at the University of Missouri in Columbia, is not surprised that the same is true for video game enjoyment. “It’s a decent thing to know, but it’s not something to shout from the rooftops.”

Bartholow cautions that the new study did not take subjects’ past exposure to violence into account. Ryan and colleagues note in the paper that more behavioral data, such as tracking video game choices and purchases over time, would add to the initial findings.

The results here are good news for game developers, gamers and also for parents who are concerned about their kid’s reasons for playing violent games, says Ryan.

“They may not be in it for the blood. They’re in it for the fun.”

February 17th, 2009

Could Obama’s election help African-American achievement?

A new study described in the New York Times suggests that Obama’s election may have some effects on African-American achievement. at least temporarily it wiped out the negative effects of racial stereotyping on performance. Of courser, as with all social science studies, we need replications to determine if this effect is more than a fluke. But we can hope:

Study Sees an Obama Effect as Lifting Black Test-Takers
By Sam Dillon

Educators and policy makers, including Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, have said in recent days that they hope President Obama’s example as a model student could inspire millions of American students, especially blacks, to higher academic performance.

Now researchers have documented what they call an Obama effect, showing that a performance gap between African-Americans and whites on a 20-question test administered before Mr. Obama’s nomination all but disappeared when the exam was administered after his acceptance speech and again after the presidential election.

The inspiring role model that Mr. Obama projected helped blacks overcome anxieties about racial stereotypes that had been shown, in earlier research, to lower the test-taking proficiency of African-Americans, the researchers conclude in a report summarizing their results.

“Obama is obviously inspirational, but we wondered whether he would contribute to an improvement in something as important as black test-taking,” said Ray Friedman, a management professor at Vanderbilt University, one of the study’s three authors. “We were skeptical that we would find any effect, but our results surprised us.”

The study has not yet undergone peer review, and two academics who read it on Thursday said they would be interested to see if other researchers would be able to replicate its results.

Dr. Friedman and his fellow researchers, David M. Marx, a professor of social psychology at San Diego State University, and Sei Jin Ko, a visiting professor in management and organizations at Northwestern, have submitted their study for review to The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Dr. Friedman said.

“It’s a very small sample, but certainly a provocative study,” said Ronald F. Ferguson, a Harvard professor who studies the factors that have affected the achievement gap between white and nonwhite students, which shows up on nearly every standardized test. “There is a certainly a theoretical foundation and some empirical support for the proposition that Obama’s election could increase the sense of competence among African-Americans, and it could reduce the anxiety associated with taking difficult test questions.”

Researchers in the last decade assembled university students with identical SAT scores and administered tests to them, discovering that blacks performed significantly poorer when asked at the start to fill out a form identifying themselves by race. The researchers attributed those results to anxiety that caused them to tighten up during exams in which they risked confirming a racial stereotype.

In the study made public on Thursday, Dr. Friedman and his colleagues compiled a brief test, drawing 20 questions from the verbal sections of the Graduate Record Exam, and administering it four times to about 120 white and black test-takers during last year’s presidential campaign.

In total, 472 Americans — 84 blacks and 388 whites — took the exam. Both white and black test-takers ranged in age from 18 to 63, and their educational attainment ranged from high school dropout to Ph.D.

On the initial test last summer, whites on average correctly answered about 12 of 20 questions, compared with about 8.5 correct answers for blacks, Dr. Friedman said. But on the tests administered immediately after Mr. Obama’s nomination acceptance speech, and just after his election victory, black performance improved, rendering the white-black gap “statistically nonsignificant,” he said.

“It’s a nice piece of work,” said G. Gage Kingsbury, a testing expert who is a director at the Northwest Evaluation Association, who read the study on Thursday.

But Dr. Kingsbury wondered whether the Obama effect would extend beyond the election, or prove transitory. “I’d want to see another study replicating their results before I get too excited about it,” he said.

January 25th, 2009

Self-control takes effort, but can be strengthened

The concept of “psychic energy,” once popular, has been decidedly unpopular in recent years. Yet it is having a small revival. The cause of this is the work of personality-social psychologist Roy Baumeister. This week the New York Times had an Op-Ed that referred to Baumeister’s work on self-control, part of his broader research program in this area. The take home message is that self-control is difficult and that its exercise in one area makes it more difficult to exercise in another. Yet the message is that one’s capacity for self-control can be strengthened. Self-control, by the way, is a central component of what psychoanalysts used to call “ego control”:

Tighten Your Belt, Strengthen Your Mind

By Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang

DECLINING house prices, rising job layoffs, skyrocketing oil costs and a major credit crunch have brought consumer confidence to its lowest point in five years. With a relatively long recession looking increasingly likely, many American families may be planning to tighten their belts.

Interestingly, restraining our consumer spending, in the short term, may cause us to actually loosen the belts around our waists. What’s the connection? The brain has a limited capacity for self-regulation, so exerting willpower in one area often leads to backsliding in others. The good news, however, is that practice increases willpower capacity, so that in the long run, buying less now may improve our ability to achieve future goals — like losing those 10 pounds we gained when we weren’t out shopping.

The brain’s store of willpower is depleted when people control their thoughts, feelings or impulses, or when they modify their behavior in pursuit of goals. Psychologist Roy Baumeister and others have found that people who successfully accomplish one task requiring self-control are less persistent on a second, seemingly unrelated task.

In one pioneering study, some people were asked to eat radishes while others received freshly baked chocolate chip cookies before trying to solve an impossible puzzle. The radish-eaters abandoned the puzzle in eight minutes on average, working less than half as long as people who got cookies or those who were excused from eating radishes. Similarly, people who were asked to circle every “e” on a page of text then showed less persistence in watching a video of an unchanging table and wall.

Other activities that deplete willpower include resisting food or drink, suppressing emotional responses, restraining aggressive or sexual impulses, taking exams and trying to impress someone. Task persistence is also reduced when people are stressed or tired from exertion or lack of sleep.

What limits willpower? Some have suggested that it is blood sugar, which brain cells use as their main energy source and cannot do without for even a few minutes. Most cognitive functions are unaffected by minor blood sugar fluctuations over the course of a day, but planning and self-control are sensitive to such small changes. Exerting self-control lowers blood sugar, which reduces the capacity for further self-control. People who drink a glass of lemonade between completing one task requiring self-control and beginning a second one perform equally well on both tasks, while people who drink sugarless diet lemonade make more errors on the second task than on the first. Foods that persistently elevate blood sugar, like those containing protein or complex carbohydrates, might enhance willpower for longer periods.

In the short term, you should spend your limited willpower budget wisely. For example, if you do not want to drink too much at a party, then on the way to the festivities, you should not deplete your willpower by window shopping for items you cannot afford. Taking an alternative route to avoid passing the store would be a better strategy.

On the other hand, if you need to study for a big exam, it might be smart to let the housecleaning slide to conserve your willpower for the more important job. Similarly, it can be counterproductive to work toward multiple goals at the same time if your willpower cannot cover all the efforts that are required. Concentrating your effort on one or at most a few goals at a time increases the odds of success.

Focusing on success is important because willpower can grow in the long term. Like a muscle, willpower seems to become stronger with use. The idea of exercising willpower is seen in military boot camp, where recruits are trained to overcome one challenge after another.

In psychological studies, even something as simple as using your nondominant hand to brush your teeth for two weeks can increase willpower capacity. People who stick to an exercise program for two months report reducing their impulsive spending, junk food intake, alcohol use and smoking. They also study more, watch less television and do more housework. Other forms of willpower training, like money-management classes, work as well.

No one knows why willpower can grow with practice but it must reflect some biological change in the brain. Perhaps neurons in the frontal cortex, which is responsible for planning behavior, or in the anterior cingulate cortex, which is associated with cognitive control, use blood sugar more efficiently after repeated challenges. Or maybe one of the chemical messengers that neurons use to communicate with one another is produced in larger quantities after it has been used up repeatedly, thereby improving the brain’s willpower capacity.

Whatever the explanation, consistently doing any activity that requires self-control seems to increase willpower — and the ability to resist impulses and delay gratification is highly associated with success in life.

Sandra Aamodt, the editor in chief of Nature Neuroscience, and Sam Wang, an associate professor of molecular biology and neuroscience at Princeton, are the authors of “Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys but Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life.”

April 6th, 2008

Social psychology of racial equality: Unequal perspectives

The Washington Post today has an interesting exploration of new results on the social psychology of race relations. Whites, they report, think more about how far we’ve come from the bad old days, and think things are nearly fine. Blacks, however, think of how far we are from true equality and are profoundly disturbed. Whites claim they would be willing to be born black for a mere $5,000:

Unequal Perspectives on Racial Equality

By Shankar Vedantam

Imagine that you are waiting in line to be born . . . Presently, you are scheduled to be born white. However, you are offered an alternative arrangement. In exchange for a cash gift, to be deposited in a bank account for you when you are born, you can choose to instead be born black.

Social psychologists Philip Mazzocco and Mahzarin Banaji once asked white volunteers how much money would cover the “costs” of being born black instead of white. The volunteers guessed that about $5,000 ought to cover the lifetime disadvantages of being an average black person rather than an average white person, in the United States. By contrast, when asked how much they wanted to go without television, the volunteers demanded a million dollars.

Mazzocco and Banaji were taken aback: The average black person in America is 447 percent more likely to be imprisoned than the average white person, and 521 percent more likely to be murdered. Blacks earn 60 cents to the dollar compared with whites who have the same education levels and marital status. The black poverty rate is nearly twice the white poverty rate. Blacks tend to die five years earlier than whites; the infant mortality rate among black babies is nearly 1 1/2 times the rate among white babies. And because of long-standing patterns of inheritance, blacks and whites begin life with substantial disparities in family wealth.

“The point we were making is, whatever the cost of being black might be, whites are vastly underestimating it,” said Mazzocco, of Ohio State University at Mansfield. “You throw in the 5-to-1 wealth gap . . . if you wanted to put a dollar-and-cents value on the difference, you would come up with a number much larger than $5,000.”

The unusual experiment is one of dozens that have found that whites tend to have a relatively rosy impression of what it means to be a black person in America. Whites are more than twice as likely as blacks to believe that the position of African Americans has improved a great deal. Blacks are more than twice as likely as whites to believe that conditions for African Americans are growing worse.

This long-standing war of perceptions created the perfect storm last week after sermons by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright — former pastor of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) — painted a picture of stark inequality at odds with white perceptions.

Mazzocco and Banaji, who teaches at Harvard, found that when volunteers learned about the disparities, they started to demand much larger sums of money.

“Many whites assume blacks are making use of old crimes to gain present-day benefits that are unearned,” Mazzocco said. “Underlying this is a misunderstanding and ignorance about black costs and white privilege.”

But knowledge about disparities is not the only reason whites and blacks have different perceptions about racial equality. Social psychologist Richard Eibach at Yale University has shown that whites and blacks often employ different yardsticks to measure racial equality. Whites tend to measure progress by comparing the present and the past — and America has made giant strides since the Jim Crow era. Nonwhites, Eibach found, are likely to evaluate racial equality in comparison with an idealized future. These yardsticks create entirely different perceptions.

When Eibach asked each group to use the other’s yardstick — whites to focus on the future and nonwhites to think about the past — the differences disappeared. Now, everyone agreed the country had come a long way — and had a long way to go.

In a speech last week, Obama similarly argued that his former pastor had failed to acknowledge how America had changed for the better. But Wright’s critics, Obama added, were also wrong — because true equality is still remote.

The intriguing question prompted by Eibach’s study is why whites and blacks are unconsciously drawn to different yardsticks. Eibach said one reason might be that racial equality means different things to whites and blacks: Whites see it as an ideal, blacks as a necessity. When people evaluate progress toward idealistic or optional goals — saving for a vacation — they tend to focus on progress made. But when people think of necessities — paying the rent — they focus on how much they are short.

In another set of experiments, social psychologist Amanda Brodish at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research showed that prejudice may play a role, too. Whites with high levels of prejudice — who think blacks are not as smart as whites, who think blacks and whites are inherently unequal, and who reported being uncomfortable with a black roommate — invariably evaluated racial equality only in comparison with the past.

By contrast, said Brodish’s co-author, Patricia Devine of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, low-prejudice whites were equally willing to apply the yardsticks of both past and future.

While comparisons with a dreadful past and an ideal future produce glass-is-half-empty-vs.-half-full perceptions, the choices are not equivalent. Each perception is accurate, but Eibach said that progress toward true equality required whites to focus on where the country ought to be instead of becoming complacent about how far the country had come.

“There is a disconnect between whites and blacks about what it feels like to be a victim of mundane discrimination,” Eibach concluded. “There is a tendency to say, ‘These mundane things are nothing like the past,’ but the lived reality of bearing that weight — the frustrations and indignities — that is a major source of the disconnect.”

March 24th, 2008

Chris Hedges: A culture of atrocity

Chris Hedges reminds us that a war of occupation is itself:

A Culture of Atrocity

by Chris Hedges

All troops, when they occupy and battle insurgent forces, as in Iraq, or Gaza or Vietnam, are swiftly placed in what the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton terms “atrocity-producing situations.” In this environment, surrounded by a hostile population, simple acts such as going to a store to buy a can of Coke or driving down a street means you can be killed. This constant fear and stress leads troops to view everyone around them as the enemy. The hostility is compounded when the enemy, as in Iraq, is elusive, shadowy and hard to find. The rage that soldiers feel after a roadside bomb explodes, killing or maiming their comrades, is one that is easily directed over time to innocent civilians who are seen as supporting the insurgents. It is a short psychological leap, but a massive moral one. It is a leap from killing-the shooting of someone who has the capacity to do you harm-to murder-the deadly assault against someone who cannot harm you. The war in Iraq is now primarily about murder. There is very little killing. American Marines and soldiers have become, after four years of war, acclimated to atrocity.

The American killing project is not described in these terms to the distant public. The politicians still speak in the abstract of glory, honor and heroism, of the necessity of improving the world, in lofty phrases of political and spiritual renewal. The press, as in most wars, is slavishly compliant. The reality of the war-the fact that the occupation forces have become, along with the rampaging militias, a source of terror to most Iraqis-is not transmitted to the American public. The press chronicles the physical and emotional wounds visited on those who kill in our name. The Iraqis, those we kill, are largely nameless, faceless dead. Those who kill large numbers of people always claim it as a regrettable but necessary virtue.

The reality and the mythic narrative of war collide when embittered combat veterans return home. They find themselves estranged from the world around them, a world that still believes in the myth of war and the virtues of the nation.

Tina Susman in a June 12 article in the Los Angeles Times gave readers a rare glimpse into this side of the war. She wrote about a 17-year-old Iraqi boy killed by the wild, random fire unleashed by American soldiers in a Baghdad neighborhood following a bomb blast. These killings, which Iraqis say occur daily, are seldom confirmed, but in this case the boy was the son of a local Los Angeles Times employee.

Iraqi physicians, overseen by epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, published a study last year in the British medical journal The Lancet. The study estimated that 655,000 more people than normal have died in Iraq since coalition forces invaded the country in March 2003. This is more than 20 times the estimate of 30,000 civilian deaths that President Bush gave in a speech last December.

Of the total 655,000 estimated “excess deaths,” 601,000 resulted from violence. The remaining deaths occurred from disease and other causes, according to the study. This is about 500 additional violent deaths per day throughout the country.

Lt. Col. Andrew J. Bacevich, a Vietnam veteran who is a professor of international relations at Boston University, estimated last year that U.S. troops had killed “tens of thousands” of innocent Iraqis through accidents or reckless fire.

Official figures have ceased to exist. The Iraqi government no longer releases the number of civilian casualties and the U.S. military does not usually give reports about civilians killed or wounded by U.S. forces.

“It’s a psychological thing. When one U.S. soldier gets killed or injured, they shoot in vengeance,” Alaa Safi told the Los Angeles Times. He said his brother, Ahmed, was killed April 4 when U.S. troops riddled the streets of their southwestern Baghdad neighborhood with bullets after a sniper attack.

War is the pornography of violence. It has a dark beauty, filled with the monstrous and the grotesque. The Bible calls it “the lust of the eye” and warns believers against it. War allows us to engage in primal impulses we keep hidden in the deepest, most private interiors of our fantasy life. It allows us to destroy not only things but human beings. In that moment of wholesale destruction, we wield the power of the divine, the power to give or annihilate life. Armed units become crazed by the frenzy of destruction. All things, including human beings, become objects-objects to either gratify or destroy or both. Almost no one is immune. The contagion of the crowd sees to that.

Human beings are machine-gunned and bombed from the air, automatic grenade launchers pepper hovels and neighborhoods with high-powered explosives, and convoys tear through Iraq, speeding freight trains of death. These soldiers and Marines have at their fingertips the heady ability to call in firepower that obliterates landscapes and villages. The moral universe is turned upside down. No one walks away uninfected. War thrusts us into a vortex of barbarity, pain and fleeting ecstasy. It thrusts us into a world where law is of little consequence.

It takes little in wartime to turn ordinary men and women into killers. Most give themselves willingly to the seduction of unlimited power to destroy. All feel the peer pressure to conform. Few, once in battle, find the strength to resist gratuitous slaughter. Physical courage is common on a battlefield. Moral courage is not.

Military machines and state bureaucracies, which seek to make us obey, seek also to silence those who return from war and speak the truth. Besides, the public has little desire to puncture the mythic, heroic narrative. The essence of war, which is death, is carefully masked from view. The few lone journalists who attempt to speak the truth about war, to describe the experience of constantly being on the receiving end of American firepower, soon become pariahs, no longer able to embed with the military, dine out with officials in the Green Zone or get press credentials. And so the vast majority of the press lies to us, although not overtly; it is the lie of omission, but it is a lie nonetheless.

The veterans who return, even if they do not speak about the atrocities they have committed or witnessed in Iraq, will spend the rest of their lives coping with what they have done. They will suffer delayed reactions to stress. They will endure, as have those who returned from Vietnam, a crisis of faith. The God they knew, or thought they knew, failed them. The high priests of our civic religion, from politicians to preachers to television pundits, who promised them glory and honor through war betrayed them.

War is always about betrayal, betrayal of the young by the old, of idealists by cynics and of troops by politicians. This bitter knowledge of betrayal is seeping into the ranks of the American military. It is bringing us a new wave of enraged and disenfranchised veterans who will never again trust the country that sent them to war.

We make our heroes out of clay. We laud their gallant deeds. We give them uniforms with colored ribbons for the acts of violence they committed or endured. They are our false repositories of glory and honor, of power, of self-righteousness, of patriotism and self-worship, all that we want to believe about ourselves. They are our plaster saints, the icons we cheer to defend us and make us and our nation great. They are the props of our demented civic religion, our love of power and force, our belief in our right as a chosen nation to wield this force against the weak. This is our nation’s idolatry of itself.

Prophets are not those who speak of piety and duty from pulpits-there are few people in pulpits worth listening to. The prophets are the battered wrecks of men and women who return from Iraq and find the courage to speak the halting words we do not want to hear, words that we must hear and digest in order to know ourselves. These veterans, the ones who dare to tell the truth, have seen and tasted how war plunges us into barbarity, perversion, pain and an unchecked orgy of death. And it is their testimonies, if we take the time to listen, which alone can save us.

Chris Hedges, who graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, is the author of “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.”

June 18th, 2007

Milgram’s Obedience

Obedience, the classic film on the Milgram experiments on obedience to authority has just become available online on Google video. Watch it here:

Or else go to Google video.

1 comment May 19th, 2007