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Audacity of Truth
"Change" You Can Believe In:
"Nixon didn’t try to do that. They couldn't control (the media). They didn’t try. [...] What the hell do they think we are, puppets?"
- Liberal opinion writer Helen Thomas, describing the Obama admin's penchant for heavily scripting public appearances & press conferences - 7/1/09
The “hidden biases” survey
Yesterday in the thread I started about Rep. J.D. Hayworth’s (R-AZ-5th district) marvelous opinion piece on multiculturalism and assimilation, the comments section of that post got sidetracked when a commenter attacked the motivations and character of those who agreed with Hayworth’s observations by saying such talk was usually only an attempt to pander to the ‘racist element’ within the Republican party. As proof of such ‘elements’, the commenter referenced a ’study’ which was reported by the Washington Post yesterday that supposedly linked political leanings to ‘hidden biases.’ The key part of the ’study’ in question:
Another study presented at the conference, which was in Palm Springs, Calif., explored relationships between racial bias and political affiliation by analyzing self-reported beliefs, voting patterns and the results of psychological tests that measure implicit attitudes — subtle stereotypes people hold about various groups.
That study found that supporters of President Bush and other conservatives had stronger self-admitted and implicit biases against blacks than liberals did.
My response to the citing of this ’study’ was:
If you think talk of assimiliation has to do with racism, you better think again, pal. Why is it everytime a Republican talks about anything having to do with race you guys start playing the race card? Answer: you need the votes. 92% of black people who voted for Democrats in the last election. You guys are already having a hard time winning elections as it is so anything you can do to keep the black vote stays on the table – including rampant race baiting where prominent Democrats like Charlie Rangel demagogue the hell out of racial issues while the party heads like Howard Dean let it pass without much, if any comment. Yet when a Republican even mentions the word black, there are calls from people like Howard Dean for “apologies” and the like and nine times out of ten Republicans will bend over backwards to make sure the black community knows they weren’t trying to be racist with whatever the offending comment might have been.
So don’t come here to this blog, and think you’ve got a leg up on anyone on the race issue because of a stupid survey – you might want to take a look at your own backyard before you start messing in someone else’s. Republicans have worked hard over the years to erase their image as a party of racists, yet the black Democrats in your party continue to get away with it because no one will call them on it.
Honest discussions in this country on racism and immigration are hard to have thanks to people like you, who want to perpetuate the myth that the Republican party is full of little more than Sheets Byrd types. Get a clue!
The whole discussion on assimilation was sidetracked by the discussion of racism in each party by that point (as of this writing, there are 86 comments in that thread on the issue), and I had planned on doing a full post about that ’study’ this morning as a followup – until I read the post Dafydd at Big Lizards wrote about this ’study.’ He’s dissected it brilliantly – I mean, just demolished it. Consider that post a must-read.
Oh, and about the scientists who conducted this ’study’? They have their own political biases which the Washington Post left out (mistakenly I’m sure 
). Michelle Malkin has the breakdown of their political contributions. Hint: they contributed to Democrats.
Surprise surprise.
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40 Responses to “The “hidden biases” survey”
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andrew, if you weren’t such a tool of the left, I’d be asking you what you don’t see.
Case in point, local paper has article of local reacton to the SOTU on top of front page. Only picture is that of the local Democrat Central Committee chairman. No GOP officials pictured. Only democrats are written about on front page. After the jump, then 1 very junior level Republican is written about and his views questioned by the reporter where as all the democrats’ views were reported unchallenged and unedited.
“Case in point, local paper has article of local reacton to the SOTU on top of front page. Only picture is that of the local Democrat Central Committee chairman. No GOP officials pictured. Only democrats are written about on front page. After the jump, then 1 very junior level Republican is written about and his views questioned by the reporter where as all the democrats’ views were reported unchallenged and unedited.”
were you talking about the political views of the washington post or the political views of the scientists?
I’m talking about the scientists. Why do their views matter? they just ran correlations on data.
Andrew, if you think the political views of scientists don’t matter, you’re sadly mistaken. Scientists are no different than anyone else, errors and biases can creep in either deliberately or unconciously. And bias is even more prevalent in the “soft” sciences (which shouldn’t even be called science IMO) like psychology or sociology. The order in which the data is presented to individuals can have an effect, as can the observers interpretation of results (hmmm…did that grimace mean he doesn’t like black people, or that he had a bad bean burrito for lunch?).
The study in question has not been peer reviewed, nor do I think it would pass an honest peer review. In case you don’t know, peer review is not an ideological litmus test, at least it’s not supposed to be. It’s a review of the basic scientific methodology and an examination of the mathematics/statistical analysis used, to make sure there are no errors, and that the experiment is repeatable.
Scientists lie and distort all the time, sad to say. I was taught that this is tantamount to original sin when I was in school, but sadly more and more scientists are doing it to get funding, make a point, support an idea they believe in.
The “scientists” views do matter. As they ignore facts that don’t jibe with their theory, they produce a skewed, cooked product, just like the “journalists”.
” As they ignore facts that don’t jibe with their theory, they produce a skewed, cooked product, just like the “journalists”.”
What facts did they ignore? And what is their ‘theory’? As far as I saw, there was no theory, just correlations.
Geez, andrew, are you THAT naive?
Let me postulate an example. I want to “prove” that conservatives are biased against minorities. I skew the dataset so that conservatives are given pictures of aggressive looking minorities, while liberals are given pictures that are calm and smiling. That’s one way to skew data.
The study does not give even remotely enough information about their methodology and data sets to allow anyone to tell whether or not there was pollution of the dataset, or misanalysis of the result, which in itself says something. Quite often, lack of information means that that info will tell you something the study proponents don’t want you to know.
“I skew the dataset so that conservatives are given pictures of aggressive looking minorities, while liberals are given pictures that are calm and smiling. That’s one way to skew data.”
They could just be making everything up. But you think they skewed the data?
“The study does not give even remotely enough information about their methodology and data sets to allow anyone to tell whether or not there was pollution of the dataset, or misanalysis of the result, which in itself says something. ”
You can read about their methodology at http://implicit.harvard.edu They also there link to their published papers. This study is currently unpublished.
Andrew, I looked at that site, and it’s not evident that the study mentioned in the article was performed the same way, however I have noticed things that don’t make me comfortable.
I looked at the survey regarding race and guns or other dangerous weapons. The experiment shows you pictures, and asks you to select one choice or the other, quickly, in response to the photos. One item I found was that, the way the sequence was setup, when the task was to select non-threatening and blacks, the ordering was changed from the previous two of the four test sequences. What this leads to is that, as might be expected, the first time the ordering was changed, there is a tendency to automatically push the same key you used for the previous two tests, even though that was “wrong.” It was easy to automatically press the wrong key, which in this case leads to the impression that one associates dangerous items with blacks more than with whites.
This was only one test, but in order to take it you had to identify a political affiliation, which may have impacted the order and precedence of the data.
Right now, I’m dubious at best. Plus, psychological and sociological testing relies on so many assumptions and is based on such fuzzy, difficult to quantify metrics, it’s almost impossible to take most of it seriously. Within the realm of the “hard” sciences, the sociologists and psychologists are not that well respected.
Be aware that skewing data doesn’t have to be deliberate, the same subconscious bias they are looking for can, and often does, easily influence the researcher.
andrew, you mean unpublished and not gone through peer review. In other words, it was leaked before the flaws were found and the study discredited within the academic community.
“andrew, you mean unpublished and not gone through peer review. In other words, it was leaked before the flaws were found and the study discredited within the academic community.”
It wasn’t ‘leaked,’ but presented at a conference, according to both the post article and the snippet that the blog post included.
I read another link that said they had not yet submitted this study to peer review, but like their others ones, will do so. I can’t find that link now.