Study: Bias Drops Dramatically for Sexual Orientation and Race – But Not Weight

https://www.wbur.org/commonhealth/2019/01/11/implicit-bias-gay-black-weight

47 67 8 years ago

TACIXAT• 8 years ago

The weight one is really interesting. If we were to see a drop in the rates of overweight and obese people, I wonder if an increase in bias would be a precursor. Not in the sense that everyone hates them and they change their habits out of societal pressure, but even among that population, a negative bias toward obesity could be a shift toward a more healthy mindset.

nategri• 8 years ago

There is already TONS of negative cultural bias towards being overweight/obese. The fact that there are still so many overweight/obese people shows that we really still don't understand the problem or how to treat it.

jotm• 8 years ago

Goes hand in hand with mental illness (depression, anxiety, etc), which often leads to weight gain through food and alcohol/drug abuse. I'd like to see if bias has dropped for that.

beering• 8 years ago

There was some discussion about the methodology on Reddit, but I think there is some controversy over whether the methodology used to measure bias is sound. Basically, you're asked to categorize a series of items as quickly as possible, and the time taken is used to measure your "implicit bias".

You can try it out for yourself at: https://implicit.harvard.edu/

Retra• 8 years ago

Your biases when making quick decisions might not have any relevance to your biases when making day-to-day decisions or when making long term policy-like decisions.

User23• 8 years ago

As usual for things where people can have strong incentives to lie, revealed preference is the only reliable indicator. But since that can't be observed in a psychology lab, instead we see questionable attempts at mind-reading like drawing spurious conclusions from response times. It would be just as scientific to hook the subject up to a polygraph and ask about biases.

Since obesity is generally seen as a moral failing rather than something that can't be controlled, people are comfortable admitting their bias. However, for race where it's rather unfair and also doing so will get you fired or worse they prefer not to.

wilgertvelinga• 8 years ago

Unlike being of a certain skin color or sexual orientation being overweight is actually bad for your health and both mental and physical performance. I'm not surprised bias is not falling.

allwein• 8 years ago

I would tend to argue that institutional racism is also bad for your health and mental well-being.

oh_sigh• 8 years ago

Sure it is, but institutional racism isn't a trait or property of any individual that they have control over.

SketchySeaBeast4• 8 years ago

Unlike being of a certain skin color or sexual orientation being overweight is actually bad for your health and both mental and physical performance.

That also would have been once an argument used against homosexuality.

hashkb2• 8 years ago

Are you saying you don't believe it's unhealthy to be obese?

Frondo• 8 years ago

Important to remember that AIDS was first called GRIDS (gay-related immune deficiency syndrome).

dbg31415• 8 years ago

"It's OK to hate them because they deserve to be hated," is your argument. Look, you aren't always wrong, but there tend to be a few factors at work here. The thing about people is that we aren't just who we are in the moment, we're the sum of our experiences to date.

If you want people to change, you have to show people not only that there are alternatives, and how to obtain the alternatives, but lastly -- and most importantly -- why they should strive for those alternatives. If you're just a dick to them, it doesn't help anyone.

Judging someone for being fat is about like judging someone for not being born rich. Eating and exercise habits are taught very young, and are very hard to change. It's very rare you see someone who is obese who wasn't put on that path by their parents.

Rather than make disparaging comments, I'm sure you have a friend who you could invite out for a jog? Or over to your place for dinners once or twice a week? Not everyone has rewards wired in the same as you do, certainly if they are obese they know it and can do without your reminder, and likely they've struggled to lose the weight and just need a bit more support.

You can either judge, and feel smug, or choose to help a friend.

ralusek• 8 years ago

Fantastic comment on reddit regarding how unscientific these "implicit bias" tests are:

https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/afmxkx/americans_u...

noobermin3• 8 years ago

Tbh, we all have qualms about psychological studies in general, especially coming from a physical scientist (physics) like myself. Every time I see data points where the error bars overlap and the authors declare an difference between the points, my gut says, "that's BS." But then again, they can't just "run more experiments" like I can, so we're left with what they have.

I'm not sure what the solution is.

asabjorn3• 8 years ago

I would argue that the replication crisis is a sign of improved rigor, but certain parts of psychology is more political than science and hence doesn't replicate well. The positive news is that psychology is in the process of establishing a clear methodology, which means it is becoming a science, and as a consequence we are seeing the replication crisis for everything that doesn't hold water relative to this methodology.

Huge wins are things such as BIG5 etc, and IAT being administered at scale before it was validated seems like a huge mistake.

jerf• 8 years ago

One of the accidental biases I think is introduced to people by their schooling is the idea that all problems have solutions. This is not a deliberate bias or anything, but an accidental one introduced by the fact that the entire process of being educated is basically being walked down a cultivated garden trail in which you are presented with a series of carefully-designed problems where the answers are intended to help your understanding of some topic. But in the real world, problems don't always have answers. If you can't get the data to answer a question, the correct answer is to not answer the question. If you can't gather enough data to separate the error bars, then you don't have an answer to the question. All you can say is that the effect, if it exists, isn't large, and you're not too sure about the effect. If what you have is not sufficient to make a call... stop.

Once you see this clearly, the idea that one can be literally unable to gather enough data, but somehow one is obligated to just create an answer even so is just... weird.

And one of the major criticisms of the current scientific system is that you can't publish a paper that says "We looked for X and didn't find it", so there's massive incentive to just force an answer out. And when you force an answer out, whereever the answer came from... it isn't the data. It's something else. Varies depending on the topic, of course, but it's certainly not the data.

(By contrast, in life we must frequently create answers to questions we don't have enough data to scientifically answer the question. That's the nature of the ride we're on. But it is improper to force answers in the scientific domain.)

gojomo• 8 years ago

There's even some evidence that merely taking the IAT can change people's behavior in ways that look like greater unfriendliness towards those at risk of discrimination:

https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1084459271381794816

heavymark• 8 years ago

That makes sense, as orientation and race one are born with and we are also not born to be bias against them but nurtured. Where is weight (which we are certainly nurtured with every marketing element we see) its also nature and evolution to in general be attracted or find pleasing healthy people since that results in healthier communities and off spring in general. The same goes for the others they mentioned such as disability. So while the nurture part could certainly change our genetic bias towards healthy people most likely will not. Hopefully the nurture part will since people are bias against people who are healthy but not peak perfection healthy.

noobermin3• 8 years ago

i think there is a big argument that the rise of obesity specifically in America is in large part due to diet, heavy in sugars and corn syrup, in response to the "low-fat" fad and corn subsidies respectively. That coupled with the love of cars and sprawl, society in America leads to obesity unless you are wealthy and have time to exercise and can afford food without processed sugars and corn syrup.

Therefore, fat is more or less a signifier of class, just as race is, and the bias against fat people is more or less just a manifestation in part of how much we demonize the poor in this country.

drankula3• 8 years ago

Rich fat people exist, and are demonized too. Obesity is a result of overeating, and can be avoided even if you're poor. Rice and frozen bags of rich veggies are cheap.

simmanian• 8 years ago

as orientation and race one are born with

A friend who studied developmental psych told me scientists are still far from reaching an agreement about the causal factors of homosexuality, that there's actually growing evidence that homosexuality is actually more correlated with one's environment during early (first 3-5 years) childhood. But since how one develops in early childhood is just as binding as the expressions of your genes, you might as well say you're born with your orientation.

yters5• 8 years ago

There is such focus on being tolerant regardless of sexual orientation, but many more people face much greater discrimination on a wider variety of issues, such as being handicapped, unattractive, mentally challenged, etc. I wonder why these groups don't get anywhere as much focus as the small number of gender non-conformist? Seems from a utilitarian perspective a much greater reduction of human suffering would be achieved by learning to appreciate the groups I mentioned, than the current mega focus on gender non-conformists. I think it is because gender-nonconformists can still be highly intelligent and attractive, thus are still useful from our society's image and performance driven perspective.

andonisus• 8 years ago

My guess would be because those in the former camp (sexual or racial minority) have been actively persecuted and deprived of life and liberty.

Djvacto• 8 years ago

I feel like this varies based on your personal experience. For example, I've been exposed to a variety of these things in close family and friends from a young age (mental handicaps, eyesight problems/legal blindness, and elderly relatives who are now wheelchair-bound or otherwise restricted). With these experiences in mind, and evaluating the people I surround myself with, I encounter very little discrimination towards these types of people in my day-to-day. But that's just based on my perception and my limited experience. It could be that outside of my social bubble, there are people who actively discriminate against those with disabilities.

Could you elaborate on the kind of discrimination you're thinking of? I'm sure people who can't see have a harder time getting jobs (and for sure have to work harder to overcome things like websites with screen-reader-hostile content), but I'm not sure if you're referring to subconscious discrimination or explicit discrimination.

The subconscious stuff is harder to deal with because it might not even hit a surface level. On the other hand, the open hostility that the LGBTQ+ people faced was easier to 'diagnose' or recognize, and thus begin dealing with.

yters5• 8 years ago

It seems pretty plausible there is a very large number of the groups I mention that rarely or even never sees the light of day due to how they are looked down upon by society at large. Some cannot enter the normal realms of human interaction, such as the workplace, so we are almost unaware of their existence.

People not even knowing one exists seems, in a way, an even more dispiriting sort of discrimination than that faced by the current persecuted group du jour.

More of these 'unseen' groups: the elderly, the extreme rural poor, the home bound, the institutionally insane, those suffering from debilitating disease, foster children shut away in group homes. And this is only considering groups we can easily access within our own nation. Much more even greater suffering in other countries.

Rarely do I see these groups mentioned in the media focus on the suffering and oppressed, but it seems intuitively a much larger grouping, and possibly enduring much more suffering than gender nonconformists.

maldusiecle• 8 years ago

This feels a bit off to me. Most of the people I've met who are really passionate about fighting discrimination against LGBT people have also been very interested in fighting fatphobia (discrimination against overweight people) and ableism (discrimination against the disabled). I think the difference may be that accommodations for disabled and obese people are often more difficult or expensive, although I don't have numbers or anything to prove that.

Accessibility for the disabled is also less of a "culture war"-type issue, so progress (or lack of progress) doesn't tend to be as visible.

turtlecloud• 8 years ago

The unspoken one is heightism for men.

kodablah• 8 years ago

Starts with the media narrative, and the media narrative starts with those preferred by or employed in the media. One can watch marketing content containing humans to see trends they attempt to drive or trends they don't. I'll reserve comment on whether it's good or bad that this influence works (if you believe the results of these studies and how they apply at a macro level vs a micro one).

goto113• 8 years ago

In many places homosexuals gets ostracized by family and community, gets beaten up and killed, get sent to hell (or at least told they will be). The other groups you mention does not face that kind of persecution. Although in some contexts like employment I'm sure It is more difficult to be handicapped than gay.

erikpukinskis3• 8 years ago

You’re just voicing your intuition, right? That’s not based on anything you’ve seen measured?

I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that uglier people are more subject to family violence, loan discrimination, etc. I am not aware of the science on the subject. But are you saying you are certain enough about the science that we should forget about it?

I suspect many of these comments are perceiving that OP is trying to minimize the seriousness of race and sexuality based discrimination, and pushing back on that. That’s valiant, but I don’t think that’s what OP said.

I think we should care about racism and care about other forms of discrimination too. I don’t think it’s a zero sum game, and the more practice we have finding empathy the better we will treat everyone.

This is a perfect example actually... sometimes racism manifests as “ugly policing” and so taking appearance policing more seriously will actually help us be less racist.

skywhopper• 8 years ago

I think you're misreading a few things, and inverting some causes and effects here.

There are people who, for political purposes, demonize people for their sexual orientation or gender identity, and actively seek to enact laws designed to punish and/or humiliate those people. However, I'm not aware at this time of any particular attempt to pass laws to make it more difficult and dangerous for, say, ugly people to use the restroom, or forbidding handicapped people from getting married (that's not to say these things are not possible! there's certainly plenty of systemic bias against these groups, and there have been political movements against disabled individuals in the past--including some which categorized "gender non-conformity" as a mental illness--but that's not the focus of current political movements that I'm aware of).

So, naturally the immediate focus is on pushing back against the currently demonized group. In the future, when the focus of demagogues who invent enemies to foment rage and gain votes shifts to handicapped individuals or overweight people, then it will be critical to focus on fighting those forms of hate.

ctoth• 8 years ago

forbidding handicapped people from getting married

It's worth reading [0] If you think this is the case.

[0] https://wheresyourdog.com/2015/08/28/dont-be-fooled-love-has...

yters5• 8 years ago

If the focus is on enacting laws to make society more accepting of ostracized groups, still the gender nonconformists are a very small minority of those who are oppressed in our society, see lists I've provided.

Now, if you are only focused on repealing laws, then you might have a case, but a lot of the gender nonconformist activism focuses on positive laws and other forms of punishment on those who don't accept them. So, insofar as there is a positive push, then it is only a small interest group out of the suffering multitudes that are benefited and my case stands that the focus on gender nonconformism is myopic.

gaius• 8 years ago

It’s well known that tall people earn more, are promoted preferentially, as another example.

nradov• 8 years ago

American society has come a long way in treating mentally challenged people with dignity and respect. But for some reason it's apparently still culturally acceptable to mock and discriminate against people in the roughly 70 – 90 IQ range; they're on the low side of normal but not low enough to be diagnosed as intellectually disabled. I see that attitude all the time among technologists and the cultural elite.

pojzon2• 8 years ago

Captain Obvious here:

Its not that we are a lot more tolerant towards race/orientation but rather humans being vastly intolerant towards anything that is biologically negative.

Our brain is programmed by thousends of years of evolution to reject unattractive/sick/(insert any disability) partners.

This is something our whole civilisation is based on and i dont think it will change.

And i say that as a pretty unattractive person. Fortunetely trumps like power, money and status exist to help few of us.

yters5• 8 years ago

Wouldn't that apply even more to gender nonconformism which stops reproduction?

free_everybody• 8 years ago

There is such focus on being tolerant regardless of sexual orientation, but many more people face much greater discrimination on a wider variety of issues

So you think you know more about how commonly LGBTQIA+ people are discriminated against than LGBTQIA+ people themselves? You think you are an authority on something you seemingly have never experienced. Think about that for a second. This is implicit bias. Learn to trust minorities when they say they're being disrespected, marginalized, etc.

Also, gender-noncomformists are gaining respect in mainstream society because of their own work. Don't try to theorize away the blood, sweat, and tears of LGBTQIA+ activists.

noobermin3• 8 years ago

Philosophy academics (the dreaded "post-modernists") have been saying how such biases are socially constructed for so long, that if the conditions in society change, people's perspectives will change. Looks like attitudes really are not so "natural" as people put them.

tlb• 8 years ago

Also, bird migration patterns are changing, therefore they must also be socially constructed.

When you use "socially constructed" to mean "influenced in any way at all by society," it becomes meaningless. Its strong meaning, "entirely constructed by society with no natural basis at all," is a useful idea.

I don't know that any serious person has claimed that attitudes about weight and homosexuality are unchanging human universals. Historical literature shows a variety of attitudes to both. Societies around the world have a range of attitudes. A post-modernist who claims to have discovered this idea is being disingenuous.

asabjorn3• 8 years ago

One of the core authors of the IAT paper administered here to measure implicit bias released a paper last year showing how the test doesn't actually measure bias, and how it is not clear what this kind of test actually measures.

Many of us wish that there was a simple link between an unconscious bias, as measured by the popular IAT test administered by Hardvard or similar tests, and biased behavior. This would give a clear path to fix any bias problem. However, Brian Nosek who is one of the co-authors of the IAT test just released a paper [1] that show that changes in implicit bias don’t lead to changes in behavior. You can find a summary of the article and its findings here [2].

The paper examining 499 studies over 20 years involving 80,859 participants that used the IAT and other, similar measures. They discovered two things: One is that the correlation between implicit bias and discriminatory behavior appears weaker than previously thought. They also conclude that there is very little evidence that changes in implicit bias have anything to do with changes in a person’s behavior. These findings, they write, "produce a challenge for this area of research." The finding that changes in implicit bias don’t lead to changes in behavior, Forscher says, "should be stunning."

"I see implicit bias as a potential means to an end, something that tells us what to do and some possible remedies for what we see in the world," Forscher says. "So if there’s little evidence to show that changing implicit bias is a useful way of changing those behaviors, my next question is ‘What should we do?’"

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/308926636_A_Meta-An...

[2] https://www.chronicle.com/article/Can-We-Really-Measure-Impl...

xster• 8 years ago

This is my biggest confusion reading the summary. Since all kinds of inputs can lead to the same measured output (such as being more scared about the entire theme and self-censoring), how would they single out 'implicit bias' and decide to label it as the cause?

Also http://kirwaninstitute.osu.edu/research/understanding-implic...

"Implicit biases are malleable. Our brains are incredibly complex, and the implicit associations that we have formed can be gradually unlearned through a variety of debiasing techniques."

I don't know... isn't it almost by definition not 'implicit bias' then?

asabjorn3• 8 years ago

Yes, it is shoddy science or possibly not science at all. Testing an assertion using known measures that have been shown to not test what you want to test does not add to the scientific knowledge and instead subtract by adding noise.

Building upon tests that has not held up to scrutiny without having a good argument for why it is different this time violates how science explores and builds knowledge. Science is a technique that produce a network of knowledge [1], where the core nodes are viewed as facts because they have successfully held up to scrutiny by other pieces of knowledge and has worked as a foundation for other pieces of knowledge.

In science pieces of knowledge that builds upon claims that are shown to be invalid, such as the IAT test, are viewed as inheriting the problems of the knowledge it builds upon.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxdBRKmPhe4&feature=youtu.be...

babyslothzoo2• 8 years ago

Unsurprising, given that sexual orientation and race are not the result of choices. There is no decision to be made, no change in input will change the output.

Dietary habits are entirely active choices, it's an active decision making process, and weight is the outcome of those inputs. Gaining or losing weight is basic physics.

Perhaps obesity and food abuse/addiction should be looked at much the same way that drug abuse/addiction is looked at. Obesity is the natural outcome of food abuse.

LanceH• 8 years ago

Obesity is the natural outcome of food abuse.

Or food enjoyment. A different reaction to the realization that we are mortal.

babyslothzoo2• 8 years ago

Sure, now replace "food" with "drug" or "alcohol" and it's the same argument, and much of the same pathology for that matter

erikpukinskis3• 8 years ago

Intetesting they didn’t look at sex-based discrimination.

bloak• 8 years ago

The term "bias" is unhelpfully vague, as is the term "unconscious", so "unconscious bias" is a dialectical disaster zone.

The IAT tests measure association (that's what the "A" stands for), not "bias". Probably I associate "Norwegian" with "tall", but that doesn't necessarily mean I'll overestimate the height of a Norwegian person who is standing in front of me. Perhaps I will, but that's an entirely different question, and the bias might go in the other direction from the association: if you're expecting someone to be tall then they might look short when they're in fact average.

Study: Bias Drops Dramatically for Sexual Orientation and Race – But Not Weight

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