Why We’re Biased About Being Biased

Re:Why We’re Biased About Being Biased by golemotron on Tuesday May 02, 2017 @01:54PM (#14248763)

> The “moral credential effect” describes this compensation in the context of moral reasoning. When study subjects were given an opportunity to disagree with sexist statements, for example, they were then more likely to favor giving a stereotypically male job to a man instead of a woman (compared to people who weren’t exposed to the statements). Likewise, people who believed they were morally good were more likely to cheat on a math test.

That's interesting. It means that if we want social justice, the last thing we should do is make people feel that they need to take public stands for it.

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Re:Why We’re Biased About Being Biased by sn9 on Tuesday May 02, 2017 @07:46PM (#14251786)

I took a different view.

I think this suggests that it's the kind of public stands that need to change (it's hard to imagine even having a civil rights movement without public stands).

Rather than hurling accusations at others (as seems to be the strategy on most forms of social media), we should focus on the common flaws we hold that could lead ourselves and others to discriminate against others on factors unrelated to their character.

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Re:Why We’re Biased About Being Biased by jkraker on Tuesday May 02, 2017 @05:28PM (#14250784)

Social media gives a lot of people the platform to do this and some use it quite heavily. It would be interesting to see the correlation between something like "ferocity" on Facebook and real life actions.

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Re:Why We’re Biased About Being Biased by golemotron on Tuesday May 02, 2017 @06:05PM (#14251056)

I don't know if there are any studies about this but I don't see anything that would make it different. Social media gives us 24/7 opportunity to feel good being on the "right" side of an issue.

I wonder whether there's an inverse correlation between social media use and direct action on civic and social causes: writing a Congress person, volunteering at a homeless shelter, or giving to charities.

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Re:Why We’re Biased About Being Biased by antisthenes on Tuesday May 02, 2017 @02:57PM (#14249445)

I took a look at the referenced paper the nautilus article cites, and it is extremely poorly designed, to the point of being near useless to make any sorts of conclusions and definitely not good enough to create any sort of social justice policies.

Not surprising, considering it's a psychology paper, but still.

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Re:Why We’re Biased About Being Biased by golemotron on Tuesday May 02, 2017 @04:03PM (#14250053)

There are 19 research references on the moral credential effect [1] and self licensing [2] on their respective wikipedia pages. It might be a bit of work to go through all of them looking for disqualifying flaws. Maybe we can assume they are ok tentatively?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_credential_effect

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-licensing

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Re:Why We’re Biased About Being Biased by meowface on Tuesday May 02, 2017 @08:23PM (#14252027)

I think the parent post was referring to the specific study regarding disagreeing with sexist statements -> favoring gender stereotypes in hiring. I don't think he was questioning the validity of the moral credential effect.

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