Anti-racism trainings probably lead people to accuse others of racism even when they're not racist.
That's exactly the result of a new study on DEI trainings, with a special focus on the impacts of the works of Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo.
Let's dig in🧵
In the first experiment, the researchers took 324 participants and randomized them to either read an Ibram X. Kendi or Robin DiAngelo excerpt or to a racially-neutral condition where they read about corn.
Here are some excerpts from the reading materials, for your understanding:
After learning, for example, that western countries are compromised by virtue of their racist ideologies and pasts, participants were presented with a scenario that was totally racially neutral.
The scenario is described as follows, and everyone involved did nothing racist:
The participants who were exposed to the 'racism' scenario imagined more racism into existence.
They believed there was a lot more bias, tons of microaggressions and whatnot, even though there was nothing.
What's worse, the participants who read the DEI passages also wanted to punish the "offenders" who—I'll remind—literally did nothing racially biased.
They were more likely to want to harm people who did nothing due to their own imaginations.
These findings were so shocking and forceful that the authors immediately sought to replicate them.
They gathered a nearly three-times larger sample and found... the same results!
But this wasn't the last study. We know that people exposed to DEI racism trainings invent racism out of thin air, but what about other -isms?
Next up is Islamophobia.
The 2,017 participants in this study read either anti-Islamophobia materials or stuff about corn.
After either reading about corn or materials from the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU), participants were then asked to evaluate identical trials, for either the clearly-Muslim Ahmed Akhtar or the clearly-just-White George Green.
Participants though the trial of Ahmed was considerably more unfair after they "learned" about Islamophobia.
But once again, there was no bias. They just read the DEI materials and invented the bias in their minds.
But why? Mechanistically, it does not seem that learning about (and seemingly believing in) Islamophobia increased tolerance for Muslims.
What it did was just to increase the perception of bias. Islamophobia materials did not boost positive sentiment towards Muslims:
A final major point of DEI trainings nowadays is caste.
I am referring not to "involuntary caste" stuff a la scholars like Ogbu, but to the Indian caste system.
As the timeline shows, its supposed importance has rapidly gained acknowledgement across the U.S.
Despite institutional acceptance that caste matters, and in particular because of bias against members of low castes, most Americans probably still don't understand caste.
So in this experiment, participants were exposed to caste oppression information, or to neutral caste info:
Participants were then exposed to a totally caste-neutral scenario in which an Indian admissions officer at an elite East Coast university interviews Raj Kumar and, ultimately, Raj gets rejected.
As you might predict from the other results, the nearly 850 respondents who read about casteism invented a lot more caste bias into the scenario than people who read about caste in general.
Not only that, but the people exposed to casteism reading material were more likely to see Hindus as racists and to want to punish the admissions officer.
What was really alarming was that, after the casteism readings, people were considerably more likely to agree with explicitly anti-Brahmin statements that were really rough, like "Brahmins are parasites", "Brahmins are a virus".
These seem like damaging ideas to promote!
Turning back to the original sample, we see something interesting: the people who scored higher on Left-Wing Authoritarianism were more likely to want to punish the people they believed were being racist.
Keep that in mind. Now let's review.
All these large-scale studies, with their simple designs, and direct and conceptual replications, with all of their results, support several conclusions.
First, DEI training introduces narratives that lead people to assume certain groups are oppressors and others are victims.
Second, DEI trainings lead to hostile attribution biases, leading participants to see discrimination when there is none.
DEI trainings ironically promote racial prejudice, hostility, suspicion, and division.
Third, DEI trainings lead to demands for punishment again perceived oppressors, as well as the ideologically impure.
This happens despite the perception of being an oppressor always being wrong in these studies.
Fourth, heightened suspicion of "oppressors" and the "impure" triggers people with authoritarian tendencies to endorse surveillance, purity testing, strict social control, and ever-increasing responses that range from corrective to coercive.
Authoritarians want to punish.
And fifth, the heightened punitive atmosphere generated by DEI trainings feeds into demands for more anti-oppression trainings, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of totally needless suspicion and intolerance.
DEI trainings have been noted to be ineffective at promoting tolerance and productivity, and plenty of people have noticed backfiring.
This adds a new dimension that teaches us about feelings and perceptions of oppression more generally.
With these results in mind, we now know that people are more than willing to totally invent racism and other forms of bias in their heads and to want to harm people because of fully-imagined bias on those people's parts.
The era when everyone was colorblind was better.
Future studies replications with fake groups would be neat, but these probably got close enough using unfamiliar groups and with these large trials due to the nature of them being randomized
After you've read enough about how civil servants stopped Trump from governing, it's hard not to imagine what Biden's admin is doing at the OPM is at least un-American and maybe evil.
Consider how career lawyers at the EPA simply refused to tell Trump what the agency was doing:
Or that time that the Department of Labor had to write a regulation a competent attorney could have soloed in two weeks, but they told Trump it would take a year.
That's like saying everyone on the team could only write less than one line a day.
Plenty of civil servants knowingly engaged in misinforming Trump in his first term.
The reason America appears overrun with "refugees" is because of a loophole
Under Obama, asylees became able to say "asylum" or "credible fear" to immigration officers to start going through the asylum review process
Obama and Biden chose not to detain them during that process
The problem has reached incredible proportions under Biden because of social media.
People are now aware of the "credible fear" standard because of posts on TikTok that explain exactly how to exploit the loophole.
And it is easy. It's often as simple as saying the right words.
Obama's loosening of the standards resulted in a deterioration of America's illegal immigration experience because it became incredibly simple to exploit.
The First Law of Behavioral Genetics holds that all things are somewhat heritable, but a new adoption study suggests some exceptions, and they're a doozy.
You know what's not heritable? Belief in Genetic Determinism.
This is a funny result at first blush, but I'm not so sure what to think of it.
The authors suggested that their measures were reliable, and so the limited systematic within- and between-family variance wasn't due to unreliability, but I'm not so sure.
The reliability measures were not test-retest reliability, and test-retest and internal reliability measures do not necessarily agree.
As an example, the U.K. Biobank's cognitive test has a moderate-to-high internal reliability and a low test-retest reliability.
Can you improve student outcomes by promoting growth mindsets?
Authors with financial conflicts of interest—for example, with growth mindset books or offering corporate trainings—publish studies that say 'YES!'
Authors without financial incentives to say 'yes'... they say 'no'.
Now here's a twist:
In unpublished studies done by financially conflicted and non-conflicted authors, the effect sizes aren't distinguishable and they're consistently minor.
The financially conflicted are aware of the fact that growth mindset doesn't work, they just lie.
They lie by omission, to be clear, and this is definitely their fault, not the fault of journal editors who won't publish nulls.
Why? Because these authors would speak up against their financial interest if they were honest.
In the distant past of the 1970s, audit studies—where you send in fake applications to check differences in callback rates—used to show evidence of a preference for males in different jobs (OR > 1).
Not so much anymore🧵
Each point on that plot is the result of a different study. This is a large meta-analysis of audit studies, with a lot of different effect sizes to choose from.
For example, we can look across jobs that are masculine, feminine, or not sex-typed and we get different results:
In the gender-balanced and male-typed jobs, bias is small, but in jobs that are feminine, it seems like women are preferred to men.
Comparing these coefficients over time, the bias in favor of males never really was significant, and now what remains is a pro-female bias:
Then, he pulls up a pitcher full of dirt. And on his third cast, he drags up pottery and some glass.
It's a frustrating day.
On the day's last catch, the fisherman calls upon G-d to provide him with luck, and he casts his net.
Out it goes, and up comes... a copper jar! It's emblazoned with the Seal of Solomon (you know, basically a Star of David), and the fisherman is delighted because he can sell it.