President Obama walks fine line on race, justice
11 years ago
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Psychology and Racism
As a psychology major, I know of a lot of studies where people judge black, white, and Asian men on factors such as aggression and how agreeable people think they are based solely on first impressions. There have been limited studies about ethnicity and racism differences. It would be interesting to have open-ended response questions about ethnicity and racism to a large population of different races, ethnic backgrounds, and social classes. How do you think people's responses would differ?
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There are so many variables to consider. The different amounts of combination of race, ethnicity, and social class could be overwhelming and would make it hard to analyze what aspect most influences a persons behavior. However, in the end, I believe whichever category a person most associates themselves with would most influence their own response, but whats to say their responses are differing solely based on a category and not life events? Very tough study.
ReplyDeleteI think that it would be difficult to compare an instantaneous reaction, such as the reaction to a facial stimulus, and an open ended discussion of race, like Mandy suggested because, these are two extremely different studies. At least in sciences there has to be some form of an independent variable that allows one to observe changes between the studies. Not only are there different variables like Nick pointed out, but the processes, which the mind uses to analyze and react, would differ between the two studies. The thought process for the initial reaction is based mainly on looks and judging the person based on past experience, which is very different to the process, that someone discussing racism and differing ethnicities would use.
ReplyDeleteWhen a person tries to judge the emotion of another person they often look for features that reveal certain clues to what that person is feeling. Studies show that a person will focus mainly on the eyes, nose, and mouth, moving all around the face but always back to those three focal points. The results that Mandy discusses may suggest that people have an instantaneous reaction to skin color, which determines the level on which to characterize other facial distinctions.
I'm not sure that responses would differ at significantly between races. Although the racism of whites against other groups tends to be the subject of most focus (probably because whites have traditional had the most socioeconomic power), I think that lots of stereotypes exist against every racial category. For example, I'm sure some members of the Asian community have prejudices against the Black community, and some Native Americans have skewed views of the Latino community etc. etc.
ReplyDeleteTo say that because identifiable ethnic groups have been discriminated against means that they have learned from that experience and now treat everyone one hundred percent equally is a little too idealistic to apply in the real world.
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