ge
the odd thing is that abusive people tend to gravitate towards positions in society where they can indulge their abusive behaviour. a responsible person, since they can do many things, is not tied to one path.
the person you mean to be: how good people fight bias
dolly chugh 2018
“Mary Kern and I expanded on the model of bounded ethicality and have developed a model of “ethical learning” which takes the psychology of good-ish people into account. We redefine what it means to be a good person as someone who is trying to be better, as opposed to someone who is allowing themselves to believe in the illusion that they are always a good person.”
“in a growth mindset, we still make mistakes and we learn from them, which makes mistakes less likely in the future. In a growth mindset, it is possible to make good mistakes. Some people worry that if mistakes are accepted as part of learning, then we give people a free pass to make mistakes. Yet research says that when we view ourselves as works-in-progress, we are more willing to hold ourselves accountable for our actions. We are more likely to apologize to people we have hurt and we offer better, more complete apologies. Accountability is higher, not lower, when we give ourselves room to grow.”
“Our behavior seems most prone to our implicit biases when we are under great time pressure or stress. Even when we are more deliberative, we may not realize the extent to which we form judgments based on implicit biases.”
When you have the tailwind, you will not notice that some runners are running into headwinds. They may be running as hard as, or even harder than, you, but they will appear lazier and slower to you. When some of them grow tired and stop trying, they will appear self-destructive to you.
The invisibility of headwinds and tailwinds leads us to vilify people facing headwinds. It is no coincidence that the groups facing great headwinds in our society are also the most negatively stereotyped.
our avoidance of self-threat does not have to win. Systems that support whiteness over blackness are hard to see, and when they are made visible, it is normal for self-threat to kick in. Research finds that when white people feel self-threat about their whiteness, they turn to one of three strategies. They may deny the privilege, like antibelievers. They may distance themselves from other white people, akin to the hard-knock life effect. Or they may work toward dismantling inequality and promoting change, the approach of moving from believer to builder.
If you are drawn to either of the first two strategies, you are missing an opportunity. In the first strategy, you do not see the need for change. In the second strategy, you see the need but are less likely to engage in work that makes meaningful change. In the third strategy, you are able to see what is happening and participate actively.
A bit of affirmation and we can better see the systems, the privilege, the personal advantage. In fact, scholars Miguel Unzueta and Brian Lowery got white people to think of racism in systemic terms by explicitly affirming the individual first. While we will not always have a researcher on standby to do this, we can do it ourselves. In other words, if we can find our own cookies without burdening other already-burdened people
what people perceive is both incorrect and much like the world they want to see.
Our tendency toward bounded awareness is also affected by where we sit in society’s formal and informal hierarchies. Power reinforces bounded awareness. Even a minimal amount of power and a minimal reminder of that power have profound effects on human thinking and behavior. A vast research literature shows that power shifts our focus from others to ourselves. We become more egocentric and are less likely to see the perspectives and emotions of others.
studying a company that had put a merit-based compensation system in place. He was perplexed to see that women, minorities, and people born outside of the United States had to earn higher performance scores to get similar salary increases to white men.
the believing may be fooling us into seeing the world as more fair than it really is. Comforted by our beliefs, we do not realize our biases are exacerbating the very problems we wish to solve. When we don’t see what is in front of us, we strip ourselves of the ability to address it.
train our eyes to look for the things we do not see by seeking perspectives from people different than us. We need to ask the questions we are intuitively not going to think of, those that might prove us wrong rather than right. We need to ask for people outside our echo chambers to share their experiences by earning their trust that we will listen fully to what they have to say. We need to keep asking questions when there is consensus in the data or in the room by resisting the urge to assume that the majority speaks for the minority.
the society in which we live is structured around these identities. Those whose identities do not vary from the norm are lulled into thinking that their experience is universal. People with other identities are reminded of their difference from the norm on a regular basis.
There are tough obstacles to moving from believer to builder. Our minds do not see everything in front of them. What we do see is what we want to see. We have surrounded ourselves with people like us. We know that we will be less likely to see a world in which meritocracy is not assumed, especially if we have a hint of power or money. As we learn what we do not want to know and as the invisible becomes visible, we may want to turn away—even (or especially) as believers. Builders opt for more awareness at these points. As we will see next, it is often a matter of will (and grace).
a change in norms could lead to a change in behavior. If we signal that it is not okay to say or do biased things, that may be enough to change some behaviors.
changing people one at a time is not the only path we have for educating and confronting people. We can also change, or at least violate, norms. In fact, doing so may be more efficient than changing people one at a time.
people who have high internal motivation and high external motivation are the most receptive to growth. In the 20/60/20 framework, this group is the 20 percent who are ready to go. I call them the “easy 20.”
Another group lacks both internal and external motivation to control prejudice. I call this group the “stuck 20.” They are not believers and are not showing signs of being open to growth. They may be loud and opinionated or quiet and resistant. Either way, they will suck the life and sustainability out of you if you try to educate or confront them. A good test for whether you are dealing with a stuck-20 person is to respond to their claim of “It seems to me that XYZ is overreacting” or their “joke” about a marginalized community by saying “I see it differently. Are you open to listening to my perspective?” Ask this question calmly and respectfully as early in the conversation as you can. Give them the opportunity to activate their growth mindset. If they resist or hedge, you are probably talking to a stuck-20 person.
You may have argued with this person at Thanksgiving or on Facebook. If your goal was to change them, this was time wasted. Their ability to hurt others needs to be neutralized. Focus your energies on the people who are being hurt. This is not an issue of education or confrontation.
When they are family or close friends, you have a choice to distance yourself from the relationship or not. If you choose to stay connected, as many of us do, the challenge is to state your stance calmly and then disengage, sometimes repeatedly. The key is not to remain silent and not to escalate. Escalation goes nowhere with this group and will drain you. Note the difference between stating “I and many others see things differently, Uncle” versus trying to convince Uncle that he is wrong. State your dissent and then focus on others who may be listening, which brings us to the “middle 60.”
The middle 60 percent is best characterized by passivity and silence, the people we are least likely to notice. This is the group most susceptible to influence, from either of the 20 percent groups. They are the high-external/low-internal-motivation-to-control-prejudice group. This group is influenced by social norms. We often forget about this group. This is where our attention is most effectively—and least likely to be—spent.
With the easy 20, either facts or stories are useful. With the stuck 20, neither facts nor stories are useful. With the middle 60, all other things being equal, stories are the way to go. Persuasion researchers find that attitude change happens through dual processes, both central and peripheral processes. The central process relies on careful consideration of facts and logic while the peripheral process is based more on stories and emotion. Research reveals that the less invested someone is in an issue, the more effective the peripheral process is. The middle 60 tends to be less invested. Stories generate quick bursts of emotion and humanity. Facts are obviously important, and are useful for rebutting falsehoods, so know and remember as many as you can. When in doubt, however, stories are more likely to persuade the middle 60.
framing my arguments toward the middle-60 people I know are reading, not the person with whom I appear to be engaging. This makes me willing to “lose” arguments (in the eyes of the person with whom I appear to be arguing) by disengaging early or ignoring bait. According to my goal to speak to the middle 60, I win, because I have countered the norm of that space. They are listening, even if they are not commenting. Winning the argument is not what breaks the norm. Breaking the norm breaks the norm.
If the target of the bias is present, we may be less inclined to get involved, because we feel it is not our place or we do not want to speak over or for someone. Yet a big part of allyship is speaking up and not leaving people on their own when they are targeted. This balance between not being a bystander but not speaking over or for someone is tricky. One approach is to turn to the target and simply ask for their guidance on whether they would like you to intervene. We can say “Would it be okay if I jumped in here?” or “I know you can handle this, but I’m here as backup” or “I’m happy to take this one” or “Say the word if I can help.” When in doubt, say more, not less.
We have a natural instinct to seek affirmation from the target for our efforts. Crush that instinct. Do not let the moment become about you.
“It’s not my job to teach other people basic humanity. It’s not. It is never the marginalized group’s job to have to teach the privileged group anything. Never, ever, ever, ever.” Still, she does engage in this work, and explains why. “If you have an opportunity to correct somebody or to show them another perspective, I think that it is important, because people just don’t know. I didn’t wake up knowing. Nobody is born woke.”
the historical narrative we have adopted suggests that “good protests” are single, spontaneous acts, says historian Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore. We falsely view the Greensboro Four and Rosa Parks as disconnected from organized, heat-based efforts. This distortion of history is costly to our goals as builders. Gilmore writes, “White Americans’ deep investment in the myth that the civil rights movement quickly succeeded based on spontaneous individual protests has left the impression that organizations such as Black Lives Matter are counterproductive, even sinister.”11 Many were not on the right side of history then and are distorting history now. As a result, we are misinterpreting the present and missing the opportunity to show our support for everyone doing the work, including those bringing the heat.
“i saw things children shouldn’t see” – surviving a troubled childhood
lucy maddox 2016
mosaicscience.com/story/surviving-troubled-childhood-resilience-neglect-adversity
early experiences of threat, but not deprivation, are associated with accelerated biological aging in children and adolescents
jennifer a. sumner et al. 2018
doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2018.09.008
tolerance is not a moral precept
yonatan zunger 2017
extranewsfeed.com/tolerance-is-not-a-moral-precept-1af7007d6376
what is wrong with tolerance: the ideal of religious tolerance has crippling flaws. it’s time to embrace a civic philosophy of reciprocity
simon rabinovitch 2018
aeon.co/essays/reciprocity-not-tolerance-is-the-basis-of-healthy-societies
motivating the adoption of new community-minded behaviors: an empirical test in nigeria
graeme blair et al. 2019
doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aau5175
media, such as films, can shift social norms and combat corruption. In the case of "Water of Gold," in Nigeria, the film clearly can change behavior. Or at least one version of the film.
As it happens, "Water of Gold" is a "Nollywood" film (a loose term referring to the Nigerian film industry, the world's third-largest), commissioned for the purposes of this experiment. The movie, set in the Niger Delta, is a sibling story about two brothers. One brother, Natufe, is a poor fisherman. But Natufe's brother, Priye, leaves the Niger Delta, gets rich in business, returns home, and becomes a corrupt politician -- to the dismay of Natufe, who becomes outspoken about endemic local corruption.
In one version of "Water of Gold," Natufe and another local activist set up a number for corruption reporting via text message and report instances of it, in scenes lasting five minutes. The other version does not contain those scenes. As the researchers discovered, "Water of Gold" does boost corruption reporting among viewers -- but only when it contains the extra 17 minutes showing the movie characters reporting corruption themselves.
"When we added the extra scenes in the film, we found we did get more people reporting," says Rebecca Littman, now a postdoc at MIT and co-author of a new paper detailing the study's findings.
Indeed, the movie, and an accompanying mass text message, spurred 240 people in 106 small communities to send in concrete, specific reports of corruption over a seven-month period, a marked improvement compared to two national campaigns that generated 140 reports per year, in a country of 174 million people.
By combining texting with the film, it becomes "less costly, and psychologically easier, to try this new thing," Littman says about corruption reporting.
The paper summarizing the results, "Motivating the adoption of new community-minded behaviors: An empirical test in Nigeria," is being published today in Science Advances. The authors are Graeme Blair, of the University of California at Los Angeles; Littman, a researcher at the MIT Sloan School of Management; and Elizabeth Levy Paluck of the department of psychology at the Woodrow Wilson School of Princeton University. Littman worked on the study as a graduate student at Princeton and is now a researcher in the Human Cooperation Laboratory, run by David Rand, an MIT Sloan professor.
To conduct the study, the researchers both commissioned "Water of Gold" and then rolled it out in careful fashion. Among the 106 places where the film was available, in 2013 and 2014, it was randomly determined whether viewers would see the "treatment" version of the film, with the corruption-reporting scenes, or the "placebo" version, which lacks them.
Both versions of the movie were also accompanied by a new system for reporting corruption via text message, which was displayed on the film's packaging and at the beginning, middle, and end of the film. Soon after handing out the films, the researchers then sent out a mass text message blast in each community, to all subscribers of the major mobile phone provider, so people simply had to reply in order to report corruption.
In the paper, the researchers term the film a "norms intervention," designed to shift public opinion about civic standards. The texts are what they term a "nudge intervention," intended to reduce the perceived logistical difficulties of reporting corruption.
The alteration of norms generated by the film involves making people feel that reporting corruption is a routine part of being a good citizen. In case people have not encountered others in their community who speak out against corruption, the film steps in to provide an example of reporting malfeasance.
"If we can't show them their neighbor doing it, we can show them these influential, famous people doing it too," Littman says.
Nigeria would seem to provide a setting where anticorruption campaigns have room to grow. In a public-opinion survey conducted as part of the research project, just under 80 percent of Nigerians said they thought the police, civil servants, and state governments were corrupt. About 83 percent of respondents said they were "angry" about having to pay bribes to conduct business, with 60 percent being "very angry" about it.
It is also no accident that the study focused on the Niger Delta region, where massive amounts of oil production have not been accompanied by an equivalently substantial investment in services and infrastructure for citizens.
Even so, the number of corruption reports the research experiment generated was significant compared to two four-year campaigns, running from 2011 to 2015, conducted by a pair of organizations, Integrity Nigeria and BribeNigeria.com, which combined to collect 385 reports.
"I think people were surprised that the campaign actually worked," Littman says
abstract Social scientists have long sought to explain why people donate resources for the good of a community. Less attention has been paid to the difficult task of motivating the first adopters of these important behaviors. In a field experiment in Nigeria, we tested two campaigns that encouraged people to try reporting corruption by text message. Psychological theories about how to shift perceived norms and how to reduce barriers to action drove the design of each campaign. The first, a film featuring actors reporting corruption, and the second, a mass text message reducing the effort required to report, caused a total of 1181 people in 106 communities to text, including 241 people who sent concrete corruption reports. Psychological theories of social norms and behavior change can illuminate the early stages of the evolution of cooperation and collective action, when adoption is still relatively rare.
local support for conservation is associated with perceptions of good governance, social impacts, and ecological effectiveness
nathan j. bennett et al. 2019
doi.org/10.1111/conl.12640
researchers surveyed small-scale fishermen in six European countries about their perceptions of and support for marine protected areas (MPAs).
"The Mediterranean and Black Seas are fished at biologically unsustainable levels, by the regions' fishing fleet, 80 per cent of which are small-scale fishers," said Nathan Bennett, lead author and research associate in the University of British Columbia's Institute for Ocean and Fisheries and in the ECOSEAS lab at the Université Côte d'Azur. "Gaining local support for one of the area's common management tools -- marine protected areas (MPAs) -- is vital to ensure conservation measures are in place and successful in the long-run."
The survey focused on three key factors -- ecological effectiveness, social impacts, and good governance -- and how these related to local support. Overall, respondents were supportive of marine protected areas overall with 29 per cent voicing strong support, and only 5.4 per cent expressing strong opposition. Ecologically, the respondents felt that MPAs had a positive impact for fish abundance and habitat quality.
Social impact indicators, including income, livelihoods, food security, knowledge, community social well-being, and connections to nature, were mostly neutral. However, the responses were not as optimistic for the 'fairness of the impacts' or for good governance indicators such as recognition, transparency, accountability, communication, participation, consultation and consent, conflict management, trust, rule of law, and legitimacy.
"Results show that for small-scale fishers, perceptions of good governance and social impacts were stronger predictors than ecological effectiveness of their support for conservation efforts." said Bennett. "This has important implications for conservation managers. Building relationships, ensuring transparency, managing conflicts and conducting outreach activities are important investments to ensure local people support conservation."
"The take home-message is that working with and communicating to stakeholders will foster support for conservation initiatives," said Paolo Guidetti, senior author and professor at the Université Côte d'Azur. "We hope that this study will help governments and managers in the Mediterranean Sea, and elsewhere in the world, to create more effective marine protected areas."
abstract Local support is important for the longevity of conservation initiatives. The literature suggests that perceptions of ecological effectiveness, social impacts, and good governance will influence levels of local support for conservation. This paper examines these relationships using data from a survey of small‐scale fishermen in 11 marine protected areas from six countries in the Mediterranean Sea. The survey queried small‐scale fishermen regarding perceptions and support for conservation. We constructed composite scores for three categories of perceptions—ecological effectiveness, social impacts, and good governance—and tested the relationship with levels of support using ordinal regression models. While all three factors were positively correlated with support for conservation, perceptions of good governance and social impacts were stronger predictors of increasing support. These findings suggest that employing good governance processes and managing social impacts may be more important than ecological effectiveness for maintaining local support for conservation.
whataboutism
the hard-knock life? whites claim hardships in response to racial inequity
taylor phillips, l.; lowery, brian s. 2015
doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2015.06.008
insecure elites and discrimination
the wealth paradox: prosperity and opposition to immigration
jolanda jetten et al. 2019
doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.2552
hypocognition and the invisibility of social privilege
kaidi wu, david dunning 2020
psyarxiv.com/5ge79/download?format=pdf
e.g. what is “useful” is essential to the logic, but is deliberately and maliciously omitted from this paper
wealth inequality: the physics basis
a. bejan, m. r. errera 2017
doi.org/10.1063/1.4977962
benevolence-dominant, authoritarianism-dominant, and classical paternalistic leadership: testing their relationships with subordinate performance
an-chih wang et al. 2018
doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2018.06.002
whisper networks
サクラ～卒業できなかった君へ～
半崎美子 hanzaki yoshiko 2017
piano sano hitomi youtube
漢字
同じカバンに詰め込んだ日々と
並べた机に刻んだ日々と
枝先に膨らんだ うららかな春
本当はあなたもここにいるはずだった
くだらないこと言い合って
肝心なことは言えないまま
止まった季節を追い越して
残った光を探していた
桜 花びらが舞う 一緒に見ていた夢を
ふわり空にのぼった あなたに送りたい
最後に見たあなたは
いつも通りの笑顔だった
行く宛てのない気持ちだけ
進んだ時間を巻き戻す
桜 花びらが散る あの日この場所で
ひらり風に吹かれて 何を思っていたんだろう
桜 花びらになり いつか会いに行く
桜 花びらが舞う 一緒に見ていた夢を
ふわり空にのぼった あなたに送りたい
あなたに送りたい
アニメver.（ショート）youtube
明日への序奏
半崎美子 2018
witnessing violence in early secondary school predicts subsequent student impairment
michel janosz et al. 2018
doi.org/10.1136/jech-2018-211203
breaking the cycle of abusive supervision: how disidentification and moral identity help the trickle-down change course
shannon g. taylor et al. 2018
doi.org/10.1037/apl0000360
"Some employees who are abused by their bosses resolve not to repeat that pattern with their own subordinates and become exceptional leaders of their teams," Taylor said. "Our study sheds light on a silver lining of sorts for people who are subjected to abuse at work. Some managers who experience this abuse can reframe their experience so it doesn't reflect their behavior and actually makes them better leaders."
The study found those who relied on their morals and integrity to defy their manager's abusive approach felt encouraged to prevent it from moving beyond their bosses.
Through multiple experiments over several years, the researchers examined the differences in attitude and behavior of supervisors who had been abused by superiors and those who had not and, in turn, how each group treated their employees. They found that abused supervisors who purposefully distanced themselves from their manager expressed respect and kindness toward their own employees, despite the poor treatment they received from their own boss.
"The lesson here isn't to hire more abusive managers, of course, but to try to encourage people who have been abused, among other things, to say, 'Look, I'm not like my boss,'" Taylor said. "You can take a stand -- not just by reporting the bad behavior, but by actively rejecting this abusive leadership style."
Taylor said he doesn't expect workplace abuse to disappear, but he notes that companies are learning and trying to solve the problem through training and maintaining positive workplace climates.
abstract Studies show that abusive leader behaviors “trickle down” to lower organizational levels, but this research ignores that many abused supervisors do not perpetuate abuse by harming their own subordinates. Drawing on social-cognitive theory and related research, we suggest abused supervisors might defy rather than emulate their managers’ abusive behavior. Specifically, we predicted that some abused supervisors—namely, those with strong moral identities—might in effect “change course” by engaging in less abuse or demonstrating ethical leadership with their subordinates to the extent they disidentify with their abusive managers. Across 2 experiments (n = 288 and 462 working adults, respectively) and a field study (n = 500 employees and their supervisors), we show that relations between manager abuse and supervisors’ abusive and ethical behaviors were carried by supervisors’ disidentification, and that the direct and indirect effects of manager abuse were stronger for supervisors with comparatively higher moral identity levels.
traumata
meera atkinson 2018
backlash: what happens when we talk honestly about racism in america
george yancy 2018
confronting injustice
umair muhammad 2016
the new superpower for women: trust your intuition, predict dangerous situations, and defend yourself from the unthinkable
steve kardian 2017
leading with weaknesses
under conditions of skeptical reception, more effective to adopt powerless communication by accentuating the flaws in your idea
disarms audience
‘here’s why you shouldn’t buy this company,’ first response laughter, they physically relax. it’s sincere
show intelligence
when show problems, demonstrate are not snowed by own ideas or trying to snow them; shrewd judge of own shortcomings. smart enough to do homework and anticipate some problems they would spot
show trustworthy
not only knowledgeable, but also honest and modest. speaking frankly of weaknesses then more credible when talking about strengths
ease of retrieval bias
leaves audiences with a more favorable assessment. by acknowledging most serious problems, make it harder for others to generate their own ideas about what is wrong. as they find themselves thinking hard to identify other concerns, they decide problems aren’t actually that severe.
Link: 01020-3b54dc7b8269219225e65ff5608ba68b.html
I hope this will be an easy read for you, for in our time, our culture had not developed far enough, and it would have been a very difficult read for most people.
I hope in your time the abusers are not so powerful as they were in ours, that you can learn without oppression, or perhaps that oppression and abuse are more recognisable to you than it was to us, so that you can avoid or deal with it more easily.
imagine you are reading this a thousand years in the future. who are they teaching you to hate? who do they accuse of abuse? what do they try to hide from you, and why? is the locked door they say is to keep you safe, in fact a prison to keep you contained?