Monday, April 14, 2008

Weekly Links We Like to Link to - This One Goes Out to All the Fly Fellows and Lovely Ladies*

Our Racist, Sexist Selves.
If we didn't know it already, our racial and gender biases go very deep, whether we want them to or not.

The University of Chicago offers an on-line psychological test in which you encounter a series of 100 black or white men, holding either guns or cellphones. You’re supposed to shoot the gunmen and holster your gun for the others.

I shot armed blacks in an average of 0.679 seconds, while I waited slightly longer — .694 seconds — to shoot armed whites. Conversely, I holstered my gun more quickly when encountering unarmed whites than unarmed blacks.

Take the test yourself and you’ll probably find that you show bias as well. Most whites and many blacks are more quick to shoot blacks, no matter how egalitarian they profess to be...

Experiments have shown that the brain categorizes people by race in less than 100 milliseconds (one-tenth of a second), about 50 milliseconds before determining sex...

Yet racism may also be easier to override than sexism. For example, one experiment found it easy for whites to admire African-American doctors; they just mentally categorized them as “doctors” rather than as “blacks.” Meanwhile, whites categorize black doctors whom they dislike as “blacks.”

In another experiment, researchers put blacks and whites in sports jerseys as if they belonged to two basketball teams. People looking at the photos logged the players in their memories more by team than by race, recalling a player’s jersey color but not necessarily his or her race. But only very rarely did people forget whether a player was male or female.

“We can make categorization by race go away, but we could never make gender categorization go away,” said John Tooby, a scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who ran the experiment.

h/t to Scot McKnight.

Generally speaking, Stuff Christians Like isn't nearly as funny as, say, Stuff White People Like or LarkNews. But I found this piece on infant/toddler's tv both true and funny (in the "Yep, that's true," sense). Being a young father really does change your outlook. Or at least what you watch.
h/t to Cubical Reverend and Jenn (with two N's) for SCL.

Ever since Stanley Fish became the head of my school and started breaking down the English Department at the U of Illinois at Chicago, I've had it in for him. Nevertheless, I find this article on deconstructionism (or French Theory) intriguing and worth a read (and someday, I'll put on my big boy pants and finish it).
h/t to Tony Jones

*That would be everybody.

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