Why some people hate Jews and Asian-Americans

[LutherBlisset]

sigh

Language is an ambiguous and flexible thing, and a social agreement between the speakers.

We have to deal with it. We can criticise wording, but calling people and their wording fucking stupid isn’t going to help.

For me, as a European and a biologist, the use of the term “race” as by commenters in this topic is hard to bear. The usage in the US is very different from, e.g., Germany, Switzerland and Austria.
But I stop short of calling it bloody fucking stupid.

But enough of that. Back to the original claim: even if the poster above could provide enough evidence that othering and subsequent racism has a biological basis, we still - as others have pointed out - are able to transcend human biology as cultural beings.

Likewise, sadly, culture and society are able to de-humanise us.

[roomwithaview]

@anon27007144

The hell of it is that this makes it easy to recruit and organize a horde of idiots, but trying to get smart, competent people organized is like herding the proverbial cats.

And each vote weighs the same.

[copykate]

@Bobo

Yes, but there’s some point of phenotypic difference where even small children recognize that things are different. My point is that the biology, or “DNA” of it likely leads to minor behavioral adaptations like 1) the recognition of “other” and 2) some slightly modified behavior responding to it.

Nope. The biologically “hardwired” part is the capacity to distinguish. And it’s not primarily a capacity to differentiate; this is, it isn’t both “you lack this trait” and its opposite, it’s just “you have this trait.” The distinguished trait is entirely socialized (which makes sense, since Baby needs to base its preference on what the group caring for it values), as is the reaction to those lacking the trait (Baby might be neutral or fear them, according to how the group reacts).

[Melz2]

@LutherBlisset

Language is an ambiguous and flexible thing, and a social agreement between the speakers.

I don’t disagree there, but at some point disingenuous arguments must be called out for what they are.

And being perfectly frank, a badly phrased and fallacious argument which reeked of passive bigotry was made upthread.

[Barradeno]

@Magdalene

Her research on infants and young children suggests that this is true early in life, too—but not innate, since small children aren’t necessarily afraid of snakes and spiders.

What about cats and cucumbers? Is that a learned behavior too?

[Melz2]

Yep.

Tried it with two different cats, neither one reacted like that (or in one case, at all.)

[Magdalene]

I can concur, my cats were utterly unimpressed by cukes.

[Melz2]

One sniffed it, then attempted to taste it and was utterly unimpressed.

The other merely rolled her eyes in pure feline disdain.

[reactionabe]

@anon62122146

considering that Cuddy is notorious not just for using bad statistics and p-hacking, which is pretty much standard practice in that field

Y’know, it’s funny, I didn’t look at the study or look into it (because no one has the time to read every study reported to them) but as soon as you said bad statistics and p-hacking, I instantly zeroed in on who you were talking about. I thought, “Oh yeah, the power pose researcher.” That should not happen. I shouldn’t have been able to guess so quickly who you’re talking about since I’m terrible with names and she’s outside my field. That rapid association is solely because I’ve seen so much reactionary crap about how social psychology is bullshit her research has become the posterchild. She’s being scapegoated for the failings of a whole field in a way that’s unfair. People who know nothing about the field but have decided to have strong feelings about it tend to pick her, because she’s the only example they can think of.

This isn’t to say that social psychology isn’t facing a replication crisis, or that Cuddy’s power pose research wasn’t flawed, but to say that she’s “notorious for” her use of bad statistics is really to say that she became famous for one episode of bad statistics. This is less predictive of the reproducibility of this research than you’re implying. Unless you know about her other research and what else she’s p-hacked or have some evidence of habitual data manipulation. If not, I’d consider interrogating why you believe that it is a

@anon62122146

Pretty big “if” in this case

And whether that belief is held to bolster a bigger position on the value of social psychology as a field. That suggestion is predicated on a set of assumptions about where you’re getting your information (very similar to where I get mine, that’s not a value judgement) , and on the assumption that you’re not a social scientist yourself. For all I know you do in fact have deeper context on Cuddy, but otherwise I think she’s getting a raw deal from having one bad idea. And of course, she could still be wrong on this, but the idea seems to have wriggled out of a lot of the articles on social psychology that it is inherently not reproducible, and that’s not really the correct takeaway.

[Urbanacus]

@copykate

Nope. The biologically “hardwired” part is the capacity to distinguish. And it’s not primarily a capacity to differentiate; this is, it isn’t both “you lack this trait” and its opposite, it’s just “you have this trait.” The distinguished trait is entirely socialized (which makes sense, since Baby needs to base its preference on what the group caring for it values), as is the reaction to those lacking the trait (Baby might be neutral or fear them, according to how the group reacts).

When we were having kids, we were very careful not to give them names that might get them teased in school. That was a thing growing up in the 70’s. Then our kids went to a heavily immigrant and minority schools with some VERY unusual names for the US. Guess what? No one ever got teased for their name. It just wasn’t done. It was, at least there, an obsolete differentiation. We have the capacity to be better people. Don’t get me started though on the use of “ghetto” among these kids, race had nothing to do with it!