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A study that does not measure racism but is framed as a study showing that “racism is a genetic trait”.

Oof.

An example of horrible #scicomm

THREAD 1/

phys.org/news/2020-08-r…
I saw this title and “thought this is so unlikely to be what the actual scientific paper said” and I was right. First things first – let’s look at the title of the actual paper, linked at the end of the article 2/
Well the article must at least talk about race and racism, right? Right?!

Ope. Never mind then. 3/
So how did we get from A to Z at lightning speed? This is a great example of how #scicomm twists research studies to fit a narrative and use clickbait titles to get attention and hype findings. 4/
First part of the article has a heading called “racist genes” (oof) and describes that some sets of self-reported attitudes genetically overlap. 5/
So what did they measure? Social Dominance Orientation (a psychological scale to assess ones preference for dominance) and some country-specific (Norway) political policies. 6/
Here’s a version of the SDO. (TBF the SDO has previously been shown to **correlate** with racism, but a correlation does not mean the scales are interchangeable and measure the same thing. That is very bad practice to assume so). 7/
The leap, which is unwarranted here, is that the SDO attempts to measure ones preference for group inequality… among any group the participant perceives. Religious groups? Income groups? Maybe. Racial groups? Maybe. The point is WE DON”T KNOW and THEY DIDN’T MEASURE RACISM 8/
The study was a twin study in Norway to estimate the genetic correlations between SDO and political policies in Norway 9/
Even the authors frame their results in a neutral way. Not as “we found racist genes” because that’s wildly irresponsible. 10/
This is bad, sensationalized science reporting. Framing findings as “evidence that racism is a genetic trait” when the study does not measure racism and the authors don’t even mention the word or discuss it in their paper is irresponsible. /end
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