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That doesn't follow at all; and is phrased in a completely insensitive way. If you want to have a civilized conversation, stop that. Boys/Men are also suscepti
by DaniFong 15y ago
That doesn't follow at all; and is phrased in a completely insensitive way. If you want to have a civilized conversation, stop that.
Boys/Men are also susceptible to stereotype threat. The priming with race is well known. They are also especially susceptible if they are primed with an "immutable talent" over "hard work = success" lesson, and then undertake a very difficult task. Boys struggle with this, and perform much worse in the next test, just as girls do.
Cultural factors are absolutely the dominant factors in which stereotypes are threatened. Both genders respond negatively to threats. That's no justification for claiming women are inferior!
An even more vivid example: Jane Elliott's Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes test:
"Steven Armstrong was the first child to arrive in Elliott’s classroom on that day, asking why "that King" (referring to Martin Luther King Jr.) was murdered the day before. After the rest of the class arrived, Elliott asked them what the children knew about blacks. The children responded with various racial stereotypes such as ignorance, unemployment, and common labels to those of Native Americans or Blacks[citation needed]. She then asked these children if they would like to try an exercise to feel what it was like to be treated the way a colored person is treated in America, mentioning that it would be interesting if there was segregation based on eye color instead of skin color. The children enthusiastically agreed to try the exercise.[1]
On that day, she designated the blue-eyed children as the superior group. Elliott provided brown fabric collars and asked the blue-eyed students to wrap them around the necks of their brown-eyed peers as a method of easily identifying the minority group. She gave the blue-eyed children extra privileges, such as second helpings at lunch, access to the new jungle gym, and five extra minutes at recess.[citation needed] The blue-eyed children sat in the front of the classroom, and the brown-eyed children were sent to sit the back rows. The blue-eyed children were encouraged to play only with other blue-eyes and to ignore those with brown eyes. Elliott would not allow brown-eyed and blue-eyed children to drink from the same water fountain, and often chastised the brown-eyed students when they did not follow the experiment's rules or made mistakes. She often exemplified the differences between the two groups by singling out students, and would use negative aspects of brown-eyed children to emphasize. Elliott observed that the students' reaction to the discrimination exercise showed immediate changes in their personalities and interaction with each other as early as the first 15 minutes.
At first, there was resistance among the students in the minority group to the idea that blue-eyed children were better than brown-eyed children. To counter this, Elliott used pseudo-scientific explanations for her actions by stating that the melanin responsible for making blue-eyed children also was linked to their higher intelligence and learning ability. Shortly thereafter, this initial resistance fell away. Those who were deemed “superior” became arrogant, bossy and otherwise unpleasant to their “inferior” classmates. Their grades also improved, doing mathematical and reading tasks that seemed outside their ability before. The “inferior” classmates also transformed – into timid and subservient children, including those who had previously been dominant in the class. These children’s academic performance suffered, even with tasks that had been simple before.
The following day, Elliott reversed the exercise, making the brown-eyed children superior. While the brown-eyed children did taunt the blue-eyed in ways similar to what had occurred the previous day, Elliott reports it was much less intense. At 2:30 on that Wednesday, Elliott told the blue-eyed children to take off their collars and the children cried and hugged one another. To reflect on the experience, she had the children write letters to Coretta Scott King and write compositions about the experience.[1]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Elliott http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Elliott
- yummyfajitas 15y agoThat doesn't follow at all; and is phrased in a completely insensitive way. If you want to have a civilized conversation, stop that. Demanding that certain ideas be phrased in a politically correct way only serves the purpose of making it more difficult to express those ideas. If your goal is to suppress dissent that is valuable, but not if your goal is to find the truth. What is your goal? If men are prone to stereotype threat in some area, then they too are inferior in that area. For example, if a "white men can't jump" stereotype prevents men from performing well in basketball, then men are indeed likely to be inferior basketball players. Similarly, in the non-scientific experiment you described, the brown-eyed children did appear to perform more poorly. Obviously the inferiority only holds in a cultural context and in certain areas - mine referred to the modern American context, where apparently even marking [X] Female lowers women's performance on scientific topics. I probably should have expressed this more clearly in my original comment. An interesting fact to realize is that the stereotype-threat based inferiority might be unavoidable. Suppose hypothetically that white men are shorter or worse jumpers (on average) than black men. In this case, the "white men can't jump" stereotype is true - but then knowledge of this true fact might cause them to also perform worse than their height would otherwise suggest due to stereotype threat. Human psychology might actually amplify innate differences in abilities.
- DaniFong 15y agoIf your goal were to find truth your arguments would be more well reasoned. I can't ascribe your phrasing to anything other than sloppiness or a desire to incite controversy. To my knowledge we haven't found a single demographic group immune to stereotype threat. I suppose one could argue under your tortured semantics that they are all inferior to one another under different forms of discrimination, but what is the point?
- yummyfajitas 15y ago...we haven't found a single demographic group immune to stereotype threat. This is a straw man. I never claimed any group was immune to stereotype threat. You claimed stereotype threat affects some groups more than others in some areas. Your specific example was women are affected by it in math. I pointed out that if this generalizes beyond the GRE, and if men and women's abilities are equal absent stereotype threat, the result is that women would be inferior to men in math-related jobs. You can claim my arguments poorly reasoned all you want, but you still haven't pointed out any flaws in them. All you did was demand I not be "insensitive" and attack straw men. I just realized I've had this conversation before, not going to waste my time further. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3256492 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3256492