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Discrimination
Apr. 14th, 2006 09:33 amIt is of course a given that most people in the world are stupid, self-deceiving, non-analytical, unquestioning, shallow and worth crossing the road to avoid. I doubt that you would be reading this misanthropic collection if you thought otherwise.
If we take it as a general theme that many of my entries will be observations on one of the above, then today we we will be looking at "self-deceiving".
I finally got round to buying Freakonomics. Much of what is written therein has now entered the world of common knowledge, but it's still a cracking read, mainly because the guy isn't scared of being politically incorrect (his theory on the reason for the fall in lynchings in the US throughout the 20th century being that they were a highly effective incentive, and therefore the reasons for them occurring declined) and isn't scared of asking awkward questions.
One of these was "how prejudiced are we"?
As many of you are probably aware, "discrimination" has been a much battered word. In the 19th century you could call a gentleman "a man of discrimination and taste" and be paying him a compliment. "Prejudice", too, has got something of a bad press recently. But the boring facts of survival are that discrimination and prejudice are endemic because they work. If we did not take snap decisions based on previous experiences, then humanity would have died out. Where prejudice and discrimination are bad is when they are wrong, i.e., inefficient. For example, dislike of blacks in the UK during the 1960s was strongest in areas where there weren't any blacks, but there was a fear that they might appear. This is the (at times efficient) "fear of the unknown". But there was enough evidence out there to show that this fear was nonsense. Those who can learn from other people's experiences are better-equipped to survive than those who do not.
But, I digress. An interesting study in Freakonomics was of people's prejudices on The Weakest Link. Even those of you who can't stand Anne Robinson (it's not that she's nasty. She isn't. It's that she is prepared to play the role of being nasty for money that I find so objectionable.) will probably know the rules of this game. The best strategy is to vote off idiots at the beginning and then gradually shift towards voting off the people cleverer than you nearer the end.
Freakonomics analyzed contestants' voting habits here. Remember that these are "public" votes, and so they are a bit like a person's response to an opinion poll when compared to their actual behaviour in the polling booth.
So, who were people "prejudiced" against (i.e., who was more likely to be voted off even though so doing was a poor overall strategy)? Not blacks (because they have a high consciousness of anti-back prejudice) and not women (because the conterstants had a high consciousness of anti-female prejudice). In the US, the prejudice was against old people and against Hispanics.
More interestingly, the prejudices were predicated on different feelings. In the case of Hispanics, it was a view that these people were poor performers, even though they might have performed quite well. This is not prejudice, it is self-deceit, letting beliefs getting in the way of evidence to the contrary. Paradoxically, if a Hispanic got through the early rounds, then he or she tended to do well, because people underestimated them at the later stage and tended to vote off opponents they (incorrectly) saw as more threatening to their quest for first prize.
For old people, no such luck. Old people were voted off because young people (the average age was young-thirties) just don't like having old people around. Old people, quite simply, make young people feel uncomfortable. So it's no good "acting young" (in fact, it's just about the worst thing you can do). What young people want is for old people to be invisible, because old people remind young people of their mortality — something which you are far less conscious off if you are only surrounded by people of your own age. In other words, if you are going into a competition where acceptance by your "peers" is what matters, then being old is a serious error.
Now it would be tempting here to enter the area of self-deceit when it comes to partner-seeking. In other words, what women/men think the opposite sex is looking for, what women/men say they are looking for, and what the statistics show that women/men are really looking for. Suffice to say that if you are a short old male with salt-and-pepper hair and no money, it doesn't matter a jot how good your sense of humour is, you are fucked.
It's lucky I've got cash.
If we take it as a general theme that many of my entries will be observations on one of the above, then today we we will be looking at "self-deceiving".
I finally got round to buying Freakonomics. Much of what is written therein has now entered the world of common knowledge, but it's still a cracking read, mainly because the guy isn't scared of being politically incorrect (his theory on the reason for the fall in lynchings in the US throughout the 20th century being that they were a highly effective incentive, and therefore the reasons for them occurring declined) and isn't scared of asking awkward questions.
One of these was "how prejudiced are we"?
As many of you are probably aware, "discrimination" has been a much battered word. In the 19th century you could call a gentleman "a man of discrimination and taste" and be paying him a compliment. "Prejudice", too, has got something of a bad press recently. But the boring facts of survival are that discrimination and prejudice are endemic because they work. If we did not take snap decisions based on previous experiences, then humanity would have died out. Where prejudice and discrimination are bad is when they are wrong, i.e., inefficient. For example, dislike of blacks in the UK during the 1960s was strongest in areas where there weren't any blacks, but there was a fear that they might appear. This is the (at times efficient) "fear of the unknown". But there was enough evidence out there to show that this fear was nonsense. Those who can learn from other people's experiences are better-equipped to survive than those who do not.
But, I digress. An interesting study in Freakonomics was of people's prejudices on The Weakest Link. Even those of you who can't stand Anne Robinson (it's not that she's nasty. She isn't. It's that she is prepared to play the role of being nasty for money that I find so objectionable.) will probably know the rules of this game. The best strategy is to vote off idiots at the beginning and then gradually shift towards voting off the people cleverer than you nearer the end.
Freakonomics analyzed contestants' voting habits here. Remember that these are "public" votes, and so they are a bit like a person's response to an opinion poll when compared to their actual behaviour in the polling booth.
So, who were people "prejudiced" against (i.e., who was more likely to be voted off even though so doing was a poor overall strategy)? Not blacks (because they have a high consciousness of anti-back prejudice) and not women (because the conterstants had a high consciousness of anti-female prejudice). In the US, the prejudice was against old people and against Hispanics.
More interestingly, the prejudices were predicated on different feelings. In the case of Hispanics, it was a view that these people were poor performers, even though they might have performed quite well. This is not prejudice, it is self-deceit, letting beliefs getting in the way of evidence to the contrary. Paradoxically, if a Hispanic got through the early rounds, then he or she tended to do well, because people underestimated them at the later stage and tended to vote off opponents they (incorrectly) saw as more threatening to their quest for first prize.
For old people, no such luck. Old people were voted off because young people (the average age was young-thirties) just don't like having old people around. Old people, quite simply, make young people feel uncomfortable. So it's no good "acting young" (in fact, it's just about the worst thing you can do). What young people want is for old people to be invisible, because old people remind young people of their mortality — something which you are far less conscious off if you are only surrounded by people of your own age. In other words, if you are going into a competition where acceptance by your "peers" is what matters, then being old is a serious error.
Now it would be tempting here to enter the area of self-deceit when it comes to partner-seeking. In other words, what women/men think the opposite sex is looking for, what women/men say they are looking for, and what the statistics show that women/men are really looking for. Suffice to say that if you are a short old male with salt-and-pepper hair and no money, it doesn't matter a jot how good your sense of humour is, you are fucked.
It's lucky I've got cash.
