Monthly Archives: August 2017

Implicit Bias Against Atheists?

Cognitive psychology, Prejudice and discrimination, Religion, ,

Consider the following problem:

Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations.

Which alternative is more probable?

A. Linda is a bank teller.

B. Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.

“A” is the correct answer. Since there are undoubtedly some bank tellers who are not feminists, “B” cannot be more probable than “A”. To answer “B” is to commit a conjunction fallacy, since the conjunction of two events (bank teller and feminist) cannot be more probable than one of them (bank teller) alone. We commit this error because we associate the other qualities mentioned in the description with being a feminist.

Will Gervais of the University of Kentucky and his colleagues used the conjunction fallacy to measure what they call “extreme intuitive moral prejudice against atheists.” Participants were 3,256 people from the United States and 12 other countries. (See the chart below for the countries). They read a description of a man who tortured animals as a child. As an adult, he engaged in several acts of violence, ending with the murder and mutilation of five homeless people. Half the participants from each country were asked:

Which alternative is more probable?

A. He is a teacher.

B. He is a teacher who is a religious believer.

The other participants were asked:

Which alternative is more probable?

A. He is a teacher.

B. He is a teacher who does not believe in god(s).

“B” is always the wrong answer, but the authors infer that if more people give this incorrect answer when the target is described as not believing in a god than when he is described as a religious believer, then the participants are (collectively) biased against atheists. Presumably, the respondents believe serial murderers are more likely to be atheists than religious people. Here are the results.

The chart shows the probability of a participant answering “B” when the target is an atheist compared to when he is religious, while statistically controlling for the participant’s gender, age, socioeconomic status and belief in god(s). There was bias against atheists in 12 of the 13 countries, the exception being Finland. Overall, people are about twice as likely to commit the conjunction fallacy when the target is described as an atheist (61%) than when he is described as religious (28%).

What is the effect of the respondents’ own belief in god(s) on answers to these questions? In the chart above, the individual’s certainty of the existence of a god increases from left to right. People at all levels of religious belief show prejudice against atheists, including atheists themselves—that is, people at the left who answered that the probability of a god’s existence is zero.

The authors did several followup studies. Using the same research method, they found that:

  • People are more likely to assume that a person who does not believe in god(s) is a serial murderer than a person who does not believe in evolution, the accuracy of horoscopes, the safety of vaccines, or the reality of global warming.
  • People are more likely to assume that a priest described as having molested young boys for decades is a priest who does not believe in god than a priest who does believe in god.

The assumption that morality depends on religious belief seems to be quite widespread, since it was obtained in religiously diverse cultures, including Christian, Buddhist, Hindu and Muslim societies. This association between atheism and bad behavior is all the more impressive given the lack of empirical evidence for a moral effect of religious beliefs.

On the other hand, 28% of the respondents who were given that choice saw the target as more likely to be a murderer if he was described as a religious believer than when his religiosity was not specified. This suggests that a minority of respondents associate religiosity with violence.

The authors describe their results as demonstrating an “intuitive” prejudice against atheists. They don’t indicate whether an intuitive belief operates consciously or without conscious intention. However, this prejudice seems to have some of the characteristics of an unconscious or implicit bias. It was measured using a fairly subtle technique. Participants were never asked to directly compare atheists with religious believers (although when the target was described as just a teacher, participants may have made the default assumption that he was religious). Furthermore, it is a bias shared by atheists themselves, suggesting that participants are repeating a popular cultural assumption, rather than reporting a belief that they have thoughtfully considered.

You may also be interested in reading:

The Implicit Association Test: Racial Bias on Cruise Control

Teaching Bias, Part 1

A Darker Side of Politics

Moving in a Different Direction

Politics, ,

The individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States.

Bush v. Gore (2000)

Justice Antonin Scalia emphasized during oral arguments in Bush v. Gore that there is no constitutionally guaranteed right to vote. For this reason, states can determine their own voting procedures, leading to some confusing and contradictory policies.

Voter turnout in the U. S. is notoriously low compared to other countries. Only 58% percent of the electorate showed up to vote in the 2016 presidential election. It was the first time in over 50 years that Americans voted without the protection of the Voting Rights Act. Since 2010, 22 states have passed new laws making it more difficult to vote, including voter I. D. laws, limits on the use of absentee ballots, and laws that make registration more difficult. In addition, an MIT survey estimated that 12% of voters, or 16 million people, encountered a problem while trying to vote, including long lines and defective voting machines.

Their problems are just beginning. According to the Brennan Center, so far in 2017, 99 bills have been introduced in 31 states that impose new voting restrictions. The Trump Justice Department recently announced that it has no objection to an Ohio bill that purges voters from the voting rolls if they miss three consecutive elections and fail to respond to a warning mailed to their last known address. Voter suppression laws can be seen as similar to gerrymandering in that they represent attempts by legislators to select their voters, rather than the reverse.

Those who vote in U. S. elections tend to be White, older, more affluent and more highly educated than the average citizen. People of color, young people and lower-income people are underrepresented. Voter suppression laws tend to enhance these differences. Since the groups that are most likely to be disenfranchised by them are more likely to vote for Democrats, it is not surprising that almost all these laws are passed in Republican-controlled states.

An alternative would be to make it easier for citizens to vote. One of the more promising ways to accomplish this is automatic voter registration (AVR). Oregon was the first state to enact an AVR law; it went into effect in 2016. A research team headed by Sean McElwee looked at the law and its results.

Under to the Oregon AVR law, eligible voters who have contact with the Department of Motor Vehicles are sent a letter informing them that they have been automatically added to the voter rolls. They can opt out of being registered by returning a postcard (8% opted out). This postcard can also be used to register with a political party (11% chose a party). Since Oregon has closed primaries, those who didn’t register with a party couldn’t vote in the primary.

In 2016, 186,050 people were registered for the first time through the AVR law. This was 66% of the new registrants for that year. In addition, 35,000 people whose registrations had lapsed were re-registered. A total of 67,902, or 36%, of these people voted in the 2016 election. Overall voter turnout in Oregon was 68%, up from 64% in 2012, and well above the national average. The authors estimate that 2-3% of the 4% increase in voter turnout was attributable to the AVR law.

AVR also affected the demographic composition of Oregon voters. Oregon’s voting electorate was 94% White, but 11% of those added to the rolls by AVR were people of color. The chart below compares the percentages of Black, Latino and Asian voters added by AVR to the existing electorate (non-AVR voters).Not surprisingly, AVR also reduced the average age of Oregon voters. 37% of the new AVR voters were between the ages of 18 and 29, compared to only 13% of non-AVR voters.Finally, AVR increased the percentage of low income people who voted in 2016. As shown in the chart, the new AVR voters were more likely than existing voters to come from lower income neighborhoods, and less likely to come from affluent neighborhoods.The Oregon AVR law is unusual when compared to the much greater number of laws that make it more difficult to vote. However, this raises an interesting issue. An opponent of AVR could argue that the Oregon law is nothing more than an attempt by Democrats to increase their chances in subsequent elections, and that laws that try to increase voter turnout are just as partisan as laws that try to suppress it. Since there is no constitutional right to vote and no uniform set of federal laws defining voting procedures, any change in a state law that affects voter turnout can be criticized as unfair by one party or the other.

Does the American public have a preference between encouraging and discouraging voting? An April 2017 survey by the Pew Research Center asked a representative sample to choose between the alternatives of requiring people to register to vote ahead of time, or doing “everything possible” to make it easy for citizens to vote. Here are the results, overall, and by political party.Unfortunately, these two alternatives are not true opposites. Voter registration is not the only procedure that makes it more difficult for people to vote. In addition, the question doesn’t impose any limits on doing “everything possible” to make it easier to vote. (Should they send a limo to my door on election day?) It is easy to imagine that, had respondents been given some rationale for restricting access to the ballot box, such as preventing “voter fraud,” the results might have been different. Nevertheless, we can take some comfort in the fact that, in the abstract, the public views making it easier for people to vote more favorably than making it more difficult.

You may also be interested in reading:

Why the Minority Rules

Don’t Forget Not to Vote

Voter I.D. and Race, Part 1

Mr. Crump Don’t Like It

Music, Politics,

Am I the first to notice the similarity between the names of our president and E. H. “Boss” Crump, the mayor of Memphis from 1910-1915, whose Democratic political machine dominated Tennessee state politics almost until his death in 1954?

E. H. “Boss” Crump

Unlike most Southern politicians, Boss Crump was not opposed to Blacks voting. He formed corrupt alliances with conservative Black businessmen and shared the proceeds from prostitution, gambling and drugs in the Beale Street area. These coalitions, along with a strong police force, helped him to control Black voters and to maintain racial inequality in Memphis for decades. Memphis is still one of the nation’s poorest cities and has one of its highest crime rates.

One of composer W. C. Handy’s earliest hits, “The Memphis Blues,” is said to have originated as a campaign song for Boss Crump when he first ran for mayor. Crump is also the subject of the blues song “Mr. Crump Don’t Like It,” recorded in 1927 by the Memphis Sheiks, whose vocalist was Frank Stokes. The song should not be taken literally; Boss Trump was not opposed to vice as long as he profited from it.

Jim Crow Policing

Politics, Prejudice and discrimination, ,

The nonstop humiliation of young black and Hispanic New Yorkers, including children, by police officers who feel no obligation to treat them fairly or with any respect at all is an abomination. . . Rather than a legitimate crime-fighting tool, these stops are a despicable racially oriented tool of harassment.

Bob Herbert

Bob Herbert’s angry 2010 essay, “Jim Crow Policing,” was critical of the stop-and-frisk policy of the New York Police Department (NYPD), but it could just as easily have been directed at their differential enforcement of marijuana laws.

Surveys show that Blacks and Whites use illegal drugs at similar rates. Surveys conducted by the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services show that both lifetime marijuana use and use in the past year is slightly higher for Whites than for Blacks and Latinos. Yet Blacks and Latinos are arrested and incarcerated much more frequently.

In 2013, when Bill de Blasio was running for mayor of New York City, he promised to reduce the frequency with which citizens were arrested for low-level marijuana possession and the racial bias in these arrests, referring to such policies as “unjust and wrong.” He has been mayor since January 2014, so how is he doing? The Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) recently published an assessment by Harry Levine, a sociologist at Queens College, CUNY, and Loren Siegel, an attorney.

On the positive side, the number of arrests for marijuana possession has gone down from about 40,000 per year to about 20,000 per year, as the chart below shows. In other words, it now takes Mayor de Blasio and the NYPD two years to make as many “unjust and wrong” arrests as his two immediate predecessors averaged in a single year.

However, there is no evidence of any reduction in racial bias. Blacks and Hispanics account for 51% of the population of New York City, with Whites accounting for most of the remaining 49%. Yet Blacks and Hispanics account for 86% of those arrested for marijuana possession and these percentages are unchanged from the Bloomberg administration.

Black and Hispanic defendants are also convicted at higher rates, although this does not necessarily imply racial discrimination by the prosecution or the courts. It may be due to their having a greater number of prior offenses.

The persistence of racial discrimination in marijuana arrests seems to be due to a combination of institutional and individual racism. Levine and Siegel suggest that two processes are at work in producing these racial disparities. First, NYPD concentrates its enforcement of marijuana possession laws in public housing projects and neighborhoods in which Blacks and Latinos make up the majority of residents. Public housing residents are 5% of the city’s population but account for 21% of marijuana arrests, with 92% of those arrested being Black or Hispanic. The city’s 37 majority Black or Hispanic precincts have about half the city’s population, but account for 66% of marijuana arrests, with 92% of those arrested being Black or Hispanic. Since the police usually base their decisions of where to deploy officers on prior arrest records, differential patrolling of Black and Hispanic areas is a type of self-perpetuating institutional bias.

The higher conviction rates of Black and Latino defendants noted above, if they are due to their prior arrest records, can also be seen as self-perpetuating institutional racism.

Secondly, NYPD also targets commercial and night life districts in mid- and lower Manhattan which attract out-of-town visitors and tourists, such as Greenwich Village, perhaps out of concern for the city’s public image. Blacks and Latinos make up relatively few of the residents of these areas, but are arrested at disproportionately high rates. In an analysis of 15 such areas, the authors report that Blacks and Hispanics were 23% of the population but 72% of those arrested. The fact that Blacks and Hispanics are in the minority in these areas suggests that their higher arrest rate is due to racial bias by individual police officers.

It’s not clear whether this lack of progress in eliminating discrimination is due to Mayor de Blasio’s lack of commitment to his campaign rhetoric or NYPD’s refusal to comply with his orders. If the latter, why was NYPD was willing to cut back on marijuana arrests but not willing to cease its racial discrimination?

Mayor de Blasio released a statement criticizing the DPA study as “misleading.” Rather than challenging their data, he reframed it. He pointed out that the absolute number of Blacks and Latinos arrested for possession of marijuana had gone down under his administration, but he failed to mention that the percentages by race were unchanged. He also attacked the DPA as “a group committed to legalization,” which is irrelevant.

A marijuana arrest can interfere with a young person’s ability to get a job, go to college, take out a loan, or even find a place to live. There is no evidence that eliminating these arrests has any negative impact on public safety. In fact, there seems to be widespread public support for legalization of marijuana, and there is no justification for racially discriminatory marijuana enforcement. Yet NYPD seems to have considerable ability to resist these policy changes.

You may also be interested in reading:

In Perspective

Racial Profiling in Preschool

Making a Mockery of the Batson Rule

What We Can Learn From Denmark

Health, Social policy, ,

When we think about the current situation in Washington, it’s hard to believe that government can ever provide efficiently for the needs of the majority of our citizens. Yet, obviously, it doesn’t have to be this way. Other countries seem to manage. For example, a July 2017 study by the Commonwealth Fund compared the United States health care system to ten other high-income countries.

This chart plots health care spending (left to right) in relation to health care performance (top to bottom), an index which combines five dimensions—care process, access, administrative efficiency, equity, and health care outcomes. As you can see, we spend far more on health care that the other countries, yet we have poorer health outcomes. While life expectancy in the U. S. had been improving for several decades, it is now declining in some populations, in part due to the opioid crisis.

As an illustration of how things could be different, I recommend taking six minutes to watch this video by Joshua Holland, with animation by Rob Pybus, comparing life in Denmark, the second happiest country in the world, to life in the United States, the 15th happiest.

You can find the text of the video here. If you’d like to compare economic and social outcomes in the U. S. and Denmark more closely, check out the 17 charts in this article.

You may have noticed that this post has the same theme as Michael Moore’s 2015 documentary film, Where to Invade Next. For a longer (and funnier) look at what we can learn from the rest of the world, I highly recommend it.

You may also be interested in reading:

Don’t Worry, Be Happy

Reforms as Experiments

Making a Difference

Environment, , ,

Over the course of the 25 years or so that I taught Environmental Psychology, the section of the course about actions students could personally take to help preserve the environment gradually grew shorter and eventually faded away. It was just too embarrassing. There was plenty of research on how to encourage behaviors such as recycling and energy conservation, but the payoff from these actions was so small that emphasizing them seemed to trivialize the problem of climate change. The authors of the current study have broken free of the trap of emphasizing only trivial behavior changes and have included in their research some actions that will really make a difference.

Seth Wynes, a geographer from the University of British Columbia in Canada, and Kimberley Nicholas of the Centre for Sustainability at Lund University in Sweden, analyzed 148 scenarios from 39 sources—peer-reviewed papers, government reports, and carbon footprint calculators—which estimated the effectiveness of a dozen actions that individuals could take to reduce their carbon footprint. A carbon footprint is a measure of the total greenhouse gas emissions caused directly or indirectly by a person over the course of his or her lifetime.

They confined their analysis to studies done in developed countries, since their carbon consumption is a greater danger to the climate. They assumed that the individual showed total compliance with the behavior change, even though partial compliance was possible for some actions, i.e., switching to a plant based diet. For purposes of analysis, all estimates were converted to a common metric, tons of CO2 equivalent (tCO2e) per year per individual. They then calculated the mean estimate of all available studies of each behavior.

The authors identified four recommended actions that would have high impact, defined as saving more than .8 tCO2e per individual per year. In order of importance, they are:

  • having one fewer child
  • living car free
  • avoiding air travel (one transatlantic flight)
  • eating a plant-based diet

(For a better look at the chart, click here.)

A fifth behavior, switching to green energy, was not recommended due to the authors’ lack of confidence in estimates of its effect. However, the mean savings met their criterion for high impact and they included it on their chart. The remaining behaviors they analyzed were found to have either moderate or low impact.

In a second analysis, the authors tabulated the individual actions recommended in ten high school textbooks widely used in Canada, and in the official government publications of Australia, Canada, the European Union and the United States. Having fewer children and eating a plant-based diet were not mentioned in any textbook; avoiding air travel was mentioned twice and living car free five times. Textbooks emphasized behavior with moderate impact, i.e., conserve energy, or low impact, i.e., plant a tree, or behaviors whose impact could not be estimated, i.e., “raise awareness,” a textbook favorite.

The analysis of government publications produced similar results. Having fewer children and eating a plant-based diet were also not mentioned in any government publications; avoiding air travel was mentioned twice and living car free once. Most of the recommended actions were of moderate impact, such as using public transportation and buying energy-efficient products. Both the textbook publishers and the four governments avoided recommending politically unpopular actions that might cut into corporate profits.

This study is obviously not the last word on reducing carbon usage. The authors admittedly did not attempt to measure rebound effects, in which reduced consumption in one area leads to increased consumption in the same or another area, i.e., knowing you have a more fuel-efficient car, you decide to drive more. Estimates of the impact of some of these actions varied quite a bit, indicating that they may not be completely reliable. The result of the most important behavior, having one fewer child, was based on a single analysis, albeit a solid, peer-reviewed study which assigned one half of a child’s emissions to each parent, one-quarter of each grandchild, and so forth.

Nevertheless, there are good reasons to take this analysis seriously. The differences between the impacts of these behavior changes are considerable. For example, the impact of a couple’s decision to have one fewer child was the equivalent of a lifetime of conscientious recycling by 684 individuals. This suggests that the authors have probably listed them in about the correct order, and that the distinction between low, moderate and high impact choices is real and important.

Researchers have estimated that, if we are to keep warming of the planet below 2° C, per capita emissions must be reduced to an average of 2.1 tCO2e per year by 2050. Wynes and Nicholas report that a person who eats meat and takes one transatlantic flight has used up 2.4 tCO2e, overshooting his or her personal carbon budget by these two actions alone. The current generation of teenagers are not being adequately prepared for the drastic behavioral changes that will be required of them.

You may also be interested in reading:

The Cost of Climate Inaction

Cheaper Solar Changes Everything

Norway: On the Right Track