Unexamined life

Racism's dead? Diversity doesn't matter? Ha! Not as long as we live in a world where people make important decisions on the basis of unexamined conscious or subconscious feelings of comfort.

Names That Match Forge a Bond on the Internet, NYTimes: But while many people are familiar with Googlegängers, a fundamental question has gone unanswered: Why do so many feel a connection — be it kinship or competition — with utter strangers just because they share a name?

Social science, it turns out, has an answer. It is because human beings are unconsciously drawn to people and things that remind us of ourselves.

A psychological theory called the name-letter effect maintains that people like the letters in their own names (particularly their initials) better than other letters of the alphabet.

In studies involving Internet telephone directories, Social Security death index records and clinical experiments, Brett Pelham, a social psychologist, and colleagues have found in the past six years that Johnsons are more likely to wed Johnsons, women named Virginia are more likely to live in (and move to) Virginia, and people whose surname is Lane tend to have addresses that include the word “lane,” not “street.”

During the 2000 presidential campaign, people whose surnames began with B were more likely to contribute to George Bush, while those whose surnames began with G were more likely to contribute to Al Gore.

“It’s what we call implicit egotism,” Dr. Pelham, who is now a writer and researcher for the Gallup Organization, said. “We’ve shown time and time again that people are attracted to people, places and things that resemble their names, without a doubt.” ...

In studies that make believers in free will squirm, Dr. Pelham’s team asserts that names and the letters in them are surprisingly influential in people’s lives. In one experiment, participants of both sexes evaluated a young woman more favorably when the number on the jersey she was wearing had been subliminally paired with their own names on a computer screen.

A feeling of connection between people with the same name is, in a way, little more than sharing an affinity for a brand — like two car owners who give each other friendly toots because they both drive Mini Coopers.

“Self-similarity is really one of the largest driving forces of behavior of social beings,” said Jeremy Bailenson, the director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab. “When someone is similar to you, you give them special privileges,” like buying something from them or voting for them.

All this means is we have to be conscious of our own prejudices; you can't fight things like racism and sexism, after all, if you don't even see your own behavior as being necessary for examination.

And, once you start looking at it, it's suprising how many issues are tied to people making universal judgments on the basis of their biases. There's this from the Washington Post, for example:

Behavioral Study on Students Stirs Debate,
Fairfax Report Finds Possible Racial Bias: For public schools in the No Child Left Behind era, it has become routine to analyze test scores and other academic indicators by race and ethnicity. But the Fairfax County School Board, to promote character education, has discovered the pitfalls of applying the same analytical techniques to measures of student behavior, especially when the findings imply disparities in behavior among racial, ethnic and other groups.

The county School Board, which oversees one of the country's largest and most diverse suburban school systems, is scheduled to vote tonight on whether to accept a staff report that concludes, in part, that black and Hispanic students and special education students received lower marks than white and Asian American students for demonstration of "sound moral character and ethical judgment."

Such findings have prompted a debate on the potential bias in how teachers evaluate student behavior and how the school system analyzes and presents information about race. Board member Martina A. "Tina" Hone (At Large), who is African American, called the school system's decision to break down data by race "potentially damaging and hurtful."

The report on student achievement under "Essential Life Skills," first presented to the board March 27, quantifies the moral-ethical gap this way: "Grade 3 students who received 'Good' or better ranged from a low near 80 percent . . . for Black and Special Education students, to about 95 percent . . . for Asian and White students." The report also indicated that Hispanic third-graders scored 86 percent on the measure.

The findings on third-grade morality reflected the number of elementary students who received "good" or "outstanding" marks on report cards in such areas as "accepts responsibility," "listens to and follows directions," "respects personal and school property," "complies with established rules" and "follows through on assignments." Such categories, which draw mainly on teacher observations, are common.

Well, sure--a bunch of white teachers might very well see blacks and hispanics as disruptive, even when they are exhibiting the exact same behavior as "normal" whites--and Asians.

I do wish the Post had broken out the data between whites and Asians; maybe the headline should've been: Blacks, Hispanics, Whites Fall Short Compared to Asians.

You'll never see something like that, of course, because journalists are conditioned to see white performance as the norm, with everything else being deviant, either "positive" or "negative".

Otherwise, if pure performance really were the measure, the headlines would be all about how whites, blacks and hispanics lag behind academic standards as set by Asians.

At any rate, conservatives, who think of humans as inherently sinful, might disagree, but most people, once they've become aware that they "just don't feel comfortable" or "just don't like" the same types of people, over and over, realize that's wrong, and can and do change.

It's the basis behind Barack Obama's presidential run, after all.