The State of the Art

Jesse Singal writes:

This was presented, in Jennifer Eberhardt’s book Biased, as evidence to support the idea that even positive portrayals of black characters could be spreading and exacerbating unconscious antiblack bias. I did not see evidence to support that idea.

I replied:

I don’t understand what you’re saying here. I clicked thru and the article seems reasonable enough, for what it is. As you probably know, I’m not a big fan of these implicit bias tests. But I didn’t think the article was making any statements about positive portrayals of black characters. I thought they were saying that even for shows for which viewers perceived the black characters as being portrayed positively, a more objective measure showed the black characters being portrayed more negatively than the whites. I didn’t go thru all the details so maybe there’s something off in how they did their statistical adjustment, but the basic point seemed reasonable, no?

Singal responded:

Yeah, I didn’t include much detail. Basically it is this thing I see a ton of in social-priming-related research where people extrapolate, from results that appear to me to be fairly unimpressive, rather big claims about the ostensible impact of priming stuff on human behavior/attitudes in the real world. I think this table is key:

This was from when they edited out black and white characters and asked people unfamiliar with the shows how they perceived the characters in question. The researchers appear to have tested six different things, found one that statistically significant (but only barely), and gone all-in on that one, explanations-wise. Then by the time the finding is translated to Eberhardt’s book, where all the nuance is taken out (we don’t hear that in five of the six things they tested they found nothing), we’re told that it could be that even black characters who are portrayed positively on TV—the subject of this story—could be spreading implicit bias throughout the land.

I don’t really have a strong take on all this, but I thought it could be useful to post on this, just because sometimes maybe it’s a good idea to express this sort of uncertainty in judgment. In any sort of writing there is a pressure to come to a strong conclusion—less pressure in blogging than on other media, perhaps, but still there’s some pull toward certainty. In this case I’ll just leave the discussion where we have it here.

Tomorrow’s Post: Bank Shot