Meaningful results (by sarah)
In this weeks New Scientist there is an artical about subconcous racism which has annoyed me - they showed the participants pictures of either black peoples faces or white peoples sublimany and then showed them a blurry picture of either an ape or a large cat and those shown the afro-carrabian faces recognised the ape picture quicker than those shown the white face first.
And this is meaningful? What profile was the cat in? Whole body outline or just face? What colour was the ape? Dark? Try it with one of the lighter coloured monkeys and see what result you get or alter the picture so that its an albino ape for goodness sake. Then it turns out that they didn't have enough black people in the study to see if they made the same association.
People are very good at rocognicing faces - we excell at it and the other primates faces are very close to ours unsuprisingly. Then you show people something similar in colour of course thye are going to process the info quicker! It said Asians taking the test recognised the apes quicker too and also that even with just the word being flashed at one group they got the same sort of association - now that is interesting and something that I would have thought would have shown an unconcous (though I'd've have thought not very) rasism. To me this picture test is worse than useless and is stirring feelings that probably didnt exist until it was published.
The comments about the evolution of man pictures being partially to blame annoyed me too as I was always teasing my very corcasion uncle that he was the missing link becuase - quiet frankly with his brow ridge he looks far more like the missing link than any of my ethnic friends.
p.s. I'm not entirely sure what terms are politically correct and which arent as I have never dwelt too long on the subject as I think its stupid - people are people. I do find myself wondering what the results would be like for an experiment like this done properlly over different cultures mind - to be fair to them it maybe a good study and the write up just a bit iffy but I find myself doubting it. If anyone knews more about this let me know.
Appologies if I've offended anyone.
Tue 19th Feb 2008 4:22 pm 
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