“Affirmative action,” write two psychologists at the University of Michigan (where else?),
is just one example of a much more pervasive and deeply rooted human tendency to even out the numbers of people from different social categories….
The propensity to correct inequalities along social category lines is not merely a legacy of President Johnson’s Executive Order 11246 in 1965 but rather a far more basic tendency,” Garcia [one of the psychologists] said.
“When we are disinterested observers with an objective perspective and not subject to in-group biases, this deep-seated tendency to even out the count from different social categories kicks in,” Ybarra [the other psychologist] said. “But when we identify with the categories under consideration, even those including gender, race or ethnicity, and we think that the decision will affect our group, our innate sense of fairness doesn’t necessarily apply.”
I can’t really tell what this means, but I think the authors are arguing that it is “our innate sense of fairness” that produces our “deep-seated tendency to even out the count from different social categories” and, further, that “our innate sense of fairness” is overcome only when we have a venal, self-interested interest in our own group’s receiving preferences (or, I suppose, we are psychologically defective, lacking the “innate sense of fairness” that most humans possess).
In other words, if the above reading is correct, a commitment to affirmative action reflects a basic, innate, human sense of fairness while a commitment to treating all people without regard to their race, religion, or ethnicity is based either on some sort of psychological imbalance or venal self-interest.
I’m not sure whether I’m more impressed by this argument’s utter, convenient predictability or its shallow and ideologically self-serving silliness. The University of Michigan press release linked above does not discuss all of the evidence for these “findings,” but it does mention one experiment on which the conclusion that affirmative action is only human is based:
In one of the experiments, for example, participants were told: “Imagine you are deciding to hire a new psychology professor in the area of inter-group relations. But first, here is some background about the current faculty.”
All participants were told that the two top candidates for the job were males with Anglo-sounding names (Adams and Smith) and that one candidate was from Rice University, the other from the University of California at Berkeley. But one group of participants was told that three of the five existing faculty earned their doctorates from Berkeley. The other group of participants received no detail on the doctoral-granting affiliations of existing faculty.
When participants knew the affiliation of existing faculty, they chose the candidate from Berkeley only 34 percent of the time. However, when they did not know the existing faculty’s affiliations, the Berkeley candidate was chosen 55 percent of the time.
And what does this quite reasonable reluctance to load up a department with Berkeley grads tell our intrepid researchers?
“Perhaps the most striking implication of the present analysis is that affirmative action policies may have far deeper psychological roots than is commonly believed,” said Garcia, the lead author of the article and an assistant professor in the U-M Gerald Ford School of Pubic Policy.
All in all, I’d nominate this study for the George Lakoff award, if there were one. (To see why, look here, here, and here.)
This seems to be one of those studies that tells us a lot more about the studiers than the studiees.
Since when did a Rice/Berkeley distinction become a valid proxy for race and gender differences?
So … let’s see … when people named Garcia and Ybarra are “disinterested observers with an objective perspective and not subject to in-group biases”, they favor … people named Garcia and Ybarra. How convenient!
Dom, the Hispanic names of the authors is quite irrelevant. It is possible that they could have done a reasonable study, and until I see the whole study, I’ll withhold judgement (remember, this is U-Mich’s press release of the study, and I’ve seen such press releases disputed by the researchers before as not reaching the conclusions the press release assigns).
But, on its face, the evidence presented here is pretty ridiculous.
The most important point is that U-M presents evidence in-favor of socio-economic criteria (in this case geographic diversity) as a proxy for race. In the past, they have attacked socio-economics because they know a race-neutral alternative destroys the narrow tailoring aspect of the case. I believe this would be the converse of John’s inividious, ubiquitous non-sequitur (IUNS). The argument is that people discriminate (that is, make sorting decisions) in all kinds of categories, and that since it makes sense in one category, it must make sense for race and gender. So I think we now have the non-individious, non-ubiquitous non-sequitur (NNNS). It’s actually quite ironic to hear this argument now after personally hearing IUNS in so many different ways over the last 3 years.